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imo

haha yeah, sorry for anyone who came to this thread expecting some constructive music theory discussion. if there's interest, maybe someone could make an open q&a thread for that sort of thing

in all seriousness, my suggestion for improvement is not to write music that strictly adheres to the natural minor mode

you also seem to be ignoring the important distinction between keys, scales, and modes, which is a distinction that has been brought up countful times by posters in this thread and the previous

i figured that the purpose of the thread was inquiry (and point scoring) but if the purpose is now to dish out bad advice instead then there's no point in hanging around. there's no ivory tower here; people who have spent a lot of time studying and exercising this stuff are trying to share some of that experience with others who want to learn

my last words are to reiterate that theory isn't a set of rules that will make your music sound good if you follow them; it's a vocabulary for communicating musical concepts. write music however you like!

[edited for grammar]

"impenetrable" is actually a quality i find very appealing in music, although "opaque" is usually the word that comes to mind. i can't be the only one out there with a taste for that sort of thing

while i predominantly agree with arlen i would also like to throw out some examples of microtonal music i love

brad smith / rainwarrior - in this new image - 5TET - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8XiIRLBqic
syzygys - a bao a qu - incl. 43-tone organ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7i6Jsed-PA

it might be important to recognize that the aim of microtonality is sometimes to approximate the exact pitch relationships of different intervals and not to be wacky

chipmusic is generally not a profitable endeavor

maybe some labels take a cut, but every label i'm aware of also has plenty of free releases in their catalog. i think chip labels are mostly motivated by a desire to curate and share cool music

except for aanaaanaaanaaana, which is motivated by a dog

thank you. i was about to edit my previous post to include this sort of statement. music theory is like a language, and thereby arguments about music theory are sometimes equivalent to arguments about semantics

which are generally considered to be a Waste Of Time

but learning it can still be useful. if someone has questions about specific facets of music theory that they'd like to understand better, a forum is a fine place to ask, but the Entirety of the domain is not something that you can distill into a post. this is why there are books about music theory that are hundreds of pages long and multiple levels of semester-long music theory classes offered at universities

in western music theory, chords are (usually and theoretically) built by stacking thirds starting at the root note. an "extended chord" is a chord that goes beyond the octave when built in this way; however, in practice it's likely that such a chord will be used in a different "voicing", meaning that the pitches are rearranged. a simple example of this is that C 047 can be a C major chord arp, as can G 059.

luckily for us keyboard players, guitarists, and chipmusicians, another aspect of "voicing" is the pitches that are omitted (yes, omitted). some of the notes in a chord are considered less essential than others, so a common guitar voicing for a maj9 chord omits the fifth. such a Cmaj9 chord might be voiced C E B D.

even if you never read or write sheet music, one benefit of using flats instead of sharps when discussing music theory is that it makes talking about chord tones more clear. a C major triad is C E G, and a C minor triad is C Eb G. they're both C triads, so it would make sense that some sort of E remains in the chord. C D# G suggests something like an inverted D#6 chord with the fifth omitted. fearofdark touched on this as well with the Caug6 example.

roman numerals aren't used for scale degrees; they're used for chord functions. that topic is really beyond the scope of this post, but knowing something about chord functions will help you understand why one chord might be substituted for another.

chord substitution again. in a progression where you might ordinarily use Gmin7, you could use C13 instead for a different flavor while still preserving the function of the chord in the progression. as chunter mentioned, these chords have tones in common; in fact, a C13 chord contains all of the tones of a Gmin7 chord.

please no; literally everyone is telling you this is an incorrect way of thinking about keys, scales, and modes. it will be hard to progress in your understanding of music theory if you insist on thinking this way.