Capital-M Music

Music Theory Guides

I’ve been writing a lot about music over the past few months, and while most of it is about my philosophy of music, “Capital-M Music”, I have also written some guides to a couple of specific aspects of music theory. These guides were mostly written to go deeper into topics I’ve been exploring in the Philosophy of Music Theory section of my Life Tips guide. I thought I’d collect them here as well so that more people might find them even if they don’t get all the way down to those tips in the Life Tips guide. So far, I have three guides:

Music as Patterns - this one was written to explore one aspect of an overarching tip I have which is the only “secret” I’ve ever found to music, which is that music is built on patterns, not notes. See Life Tips General Musicianship Tip No. 1. This guide was particularly written for Life Tips Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 1, which relates back to that first tip and explores that idea some more. This guide uses a chord progression with a high pedal tone to show how the “meaning” of a note changes based on where it fits against a chord, and also where it fits in an overall chord progression.

Chord Voicing - This one was written to go deeper into the core harmony concept of Chord Voicing, as explored briefly in Life Tips Philosophy of Music Theory Tip No. 5. That tip is about using the same word to mean different things to different types of musicians. For people that wanted to explore this use of the term “Voicing”, I wrote up this guide to the concept. This one also includes several examples of real-world pieces that demonstrate some of the points.

How to Think About Modes - This was a guide I put together for a friend of mine in 2022 to help him with modes (a type of scale pattern). I’ve heard from many people personally and in comments online about how confusing modes are, so I thought I’d share an expanded version of this guide here for anyone who might be struggling with modal theory. I will be expanding it more in the future as well.