DEFINITELY NOT NECESSARY
BUT IT CAN BE NICE

Victory Road wrote:

there are people who go to university for several years to study how to compose music and they end up writing awful 12-tone wank so y'know i guess it's all about what you think is good.

i'd say it's definitely necessary to write "clever" music, but then there's got to be people who'd disagree with that too haha

those with composition degrees are responsible for a large part of pop music

...starting a band with only flutes is "forbidden" in death metal.

SATISFACTRON wrote:

*Theory Hero*

hahaha Nah, I'm not saying theory is essential. But there's a difference between saying theory is not essential, and calling it bullshit. Seeing as theory is nothing more than the analysis of existing music, calling it bullshit is pretty close to calling music itself bullshit.

Think of it as science. Whether you understand why tides roll or not won't stop them from doing it for a very specific and explainable reason. We were sailing across the globe centuries before we understood how the tides work. And that's quite fine. All you really need is a pair of eyes to see if there's enough water in front of you to sail your boat in. If you sail often enough, you'll notice patterns. You'll know the tide is high at certain moments, and low at others. You'll know this with enough confidence to predict when sailing a particular place is safe or not. That's where the large majority of musicians are. They don't know the exact science behind it, but they're confident enough in the patterns they've observed to predict some things. If what you want to do is sail your boat around, content to know that the tide is high at a certain moment, or low at another then hey...sail away! But it doesn't mean that people who studied this academically and figured out that it was the gravitational pull of other celestial bodies just wasted their time. Yknow.. whatever floats your boat (see what I did there?) But scientific knowledge of the tides made fishing more efficient. Made sailing easier and safer. Made it possible to create the Panama canal, etc.

Not caring about theory, I can live with, seeing as it's pretty much how I function myself. But disregarding it as pointless is simple ignorance.

*Theory Hero*

One similarity between Beethoven and chiptuners is that both die virgins.

1-Down wrote:

I have a BS in music and I tell everyone this. Learn everything up to secondary dominants, which in college curriculum is most likely just Music Theory 1, a single semester. After that it gets into the weird stuff that you'll never use as mentioned above.

Hmm, I don't completely agree. Augmented 6ths, jazz theory, alternative scales/modes, rhythmic tension/resolution - there's some pretty neat stuff to learn from those things, even if you don't end up using any of those techniques in your own compositions.

bitjacker wrote:

I am under the impression that ear training  and sight singing would help you. theory is not relevant unless you wanna copy or perform other peoples music. problem is that theory is intertwined. writing down ideas can be done in other ways than notes on a paper. do you have a voice recorder? they are cheap ($40 for a sony that will capture at 128)... hum your thought-tunes into it. this is where ear training will help you (like minor 2nd is jaws song)
if its all too much too fast, a tascam  guitar trainer can slow down mp3's so you can try to pound out the notes on an instrument.
theory will try to tell you that a semitone under an octave needs to go up. i say bull sh*t. Its time to stop sounding like beethoven already.
No matter what, expect to put time into learning. learn what is useful. learning key signatures might just be a waste of time if  your intent is to never read sheet music, but compose in trackers.

YEAH!

Also if you wanna be good at hockey, fuck the rules. They say the puck goes in the net, I say bull sh*t. Its time to stop playing like the Habs already. Learning the rules might just be a waste of time if your intent is to never play in an arena, but play hockey outside.

This level of stupidity can't be natural, you've clearly trained for years to achieve this. Theory is not relevant unless you want to copy other people. Words fucking fail me.

Please mister jacker, do show us your music. Try as I might no amount of Google magic returns any result.