Anyone here know any entry level music theory or piano books?

me too

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Is this any good?

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bump

Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony is one of the best places to start on theory. Most books these days do not spend much time on the major scale and diatonic triads, just give a quick run down and move on, they really are the foundation and Schoenberg is one of the few that fully explains them and their importance to harmony.

This. Yea Forums is fucking garbage when it comes to music apart from the /classical/ general and a gem every once and a while

This place ain't much better, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony is the only decent book mentioned so far. The rest is general gimmicks, genre specific, and a modern text book, The Complete Musician, while being complete, it simplifies and glosses over things in the text because it assumes you have a teacher to fill in the nuance.

Schoenberg's Fundamentals of Musical Composition, suggested by the dilettante who suggested books they never read, is a great book, but it is more about form and structure and assumes you have a good foundation in harmony already. It can be thought of as part two of his Theory of Harmony.

Start with Harmony by Walter Piston

Get yourself Schoenberg's Harmony, Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, and Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. You'll be fucking that piano in no time.

>Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony is one of the best places to start on theory
doesn't it assume previous knowledge in music theory though? is it really suitable for a beginner?

this worked for me

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Not specifically theory, but has anyone read any of these?

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If you're an absolute begginer try musictheory.net/lessons (up to chord progressions) + tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals (intervals and chords are enough for now). You could add Mikrokosmos if you want to sight read pieces but I don't think it's too improtant at this stage.

It should be helpful to learn a lot of popular songs during the process (you can look up chords but you should figure out melodies by ear).

Then you can start with The Complete Musician by Steven Laitz.

There's a guitar&bass thread on Yea Forums where you can find a lot of books, but Laitz is the only one I'm familiar with.

I've heard The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis is better suited for self-study but I couldn't find it as cheap as Laitz so I can't really recommend it.

idk, complete musician seems a bit too dense to be 900 pgs long, and feels like it tries to do everything but kind of superficially

Yea Forums is such a farce now

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>doesn't it assume previous knowledge
Just need to be able to read music, don't need to be fluent or anything, and you could learn as you go with no trouble. 15 minutes a day practicing for a week would probably be plenty adequate to get you going.

That is exactly what it is, and most modern text books as well, they assume a teacher. Laitz pretty much tried to cover all of music theory in one book, does not go into any real depth.

I just gave my copy a browse to freshen my memory, he does assume some knowledge of terms, does not explicitly define some things, but it is of little consequence, he still teaches them fully and just accepting them as they are in the text should be enough, they will click into place as you advance. You will likely need to look up the occasional term, dictionary should be plenty, will not need depth, he provides that. It is different from most Harmony books in that it teaches composition at the same time, which is a smart way to go even if you have no interest in composition, and a great method.

Regardless of what book you get you will also want a notebook of staff paper, it is easier to make written notes on staff paper than it is to make staffs on note paper, drawing staffs gets old fast.

>drawing staffs gets old fast
yes, it does, specially if you freehand it like ass lmao

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Shit man, spend the $5 on some staff paper, it will change your life. Get the good stuff, pencil erases very well and pen does not bleed through to the other side effectively reducing your note book to single sided pages. Inking in the note bleeds through horribly on the cheap stuff, can not really tell which notes are from the other side and which from the side you are reading.

>not just using notation software
youtube.com/watch?v=ta41xU-tkFA

Notation software ducts for jotting down ideas, exercises, working out theory or composing at your instrument. It has its use, but is slower for most of daily notation tasks, great when you need a professional score that is easy to read and reproduce.

And what exactly is the point of reading that stuff as an absolute beginner? You won't learn properly without a teacher, picking up some thousand page theory book would be just LARPing. Doubt you'll read more than the first couple chapters anyway.

If you want to learn to play in your spare time, just look up some sites and watch some videos, focus on playing. If you want to make music, you'll learn by using a DAW. Just supplemental music theory. If you just want to masturbate and pretend like you understand music without ever playing or composing anything of note yourself, then go ahead, start by reading those hundreds of pages...

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Haha, you have no idea what you are talking about, many learn theory on their own and if you start with building a good foundation in harmony you will do fine. You come off like someone who failed and decided that if you can not do it, no one can.

Yea Forums is all about consuming.

I've read excerpts in the library. Can't speak for the early music volume, but his stuff on the moderns seemed pretty thorough and accurate.

consuming what?
as far as I know, as other user mentioned, Yea Forums is just like Yea Forums: a few gems in the middle of an ocean of shitposts, usually made by people who don't appreciate the medium and/or have poor taste/close mind.

while playing some instrument is important to absorb the theorical information of the book and to apply it so as to convert it into knowledge, "dude just play lmao" isn't great advice either. One can develop enough tacit knowledge to improvise/writ some music just by playing without knowing any theory but it takes a long ass time. If one is able to absorb and later on apply music theory it will shorten the way by a fucking lot, not to mention one will know what he is doing and why, (eg "I know I can play these scales in this chord progression" as opposed to "I made enough mistakes to kind of remember which notes sound good and which sound bad under this chord") and will have a base to know why he doesn't like X or Y.

based

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ok i n c e l

based, but have sex anyway

lol nerd

have intercourse

consuming dick.
nothing but pretentious faggots and meme rap/kpop loving retards there now. i recently came back to it and seriously fuck that. time to leave that place for good.

Have sex

This and part II are the ones you should start with.

I go there solely for jazz threads and 90% of the time most replies have some kind of contribution, I've been exploring jazz for the past week and I got a lot of very solid recs in those threads. Out of the ~25 records Ilistened to something like 10 were recommendations and I enjoyed every one of them.

>pretentious
I honestly don't understand how can someone that supposedly takes some art medium seriously call other people that do so to "pretentious". Do you not think people can sincerely appreciate high brow music or literature or films?

lmao look at these pretentious fucking literature faggots
have sex i n c e l

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Very bluepilled

have sex i n c e l

Based

there is literally nothing incorrect about this post
wasn't true maybe 6 years ago but gradually Yea Forums has just turned into teenagers acting like it's anonymous instagram

Yea Forums - commodification of identity

Yea Forums here. U rite

What book would you recommend for a someone to get a thorough understanding of music theory without a teacher? Are the two books by Schoenberg that you mentioned enough?

yikes

it has been always shit, and P L E A S E have sex incel

piano broscience

Bruser, Madeline, The Art of Practicing
Cannel, Ward, and Marx, Fred, How to play the piano despite years of lessons
Chang, Chuan C., Fundamentals of Piano Practice (personal fav)
Elson, Margaret, Passionate Practice
Fink, Seymour, Mastering Piano Technique
Gieseking, Walter, and Leimer, Karl, Piano Technique
Hofman, Josef, Piano Playing, With Piano Questions Answered
Matthay, Tobias, The Visible and Invisible in Pianoforte Technique
Neuhaus, Heinrich, The Art of Piano Playing (almost too general)
Sandor, Gyorgy, On Piano Playing
Whiteside, Abby, On Piano Playing

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*and Neil Stannard - Piano Technique Demystified

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I believe the /classical/ general on Yea Forums has a mega with music theory pdfs

music theory is a meme. one you learn intervals youve gone too far.
inb4 theoryfag unable to make anything emotional comes to "correc"t me

mot cool bro

based

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are you starting fron scratch? you know nothing about music and music theory?

>Schoenberg that you mentioned enough?
Depends, music theory is a fucking huge topic, it is a full language and people spend their lives studying it.

Harmony is the first step, it is the grammar of western theory, if you do not have a good base in harmony you will not understand, plain and simple. After you get Harmony down you expand into your areas of interest, if that is classical of the past few hundred years you would follow with books on form and counterpoint, or you can dig into jazz theory or even the theories of the rest of the world. One of the things that sets western theory apart is that it developed analysis alongside its theory and took both to a level of autism that makes this place look like a board full of normies, as a result in depth studies of the music theories of other cultures are more often than not, done within the language of western theory.

Harmony will take you a long ways and you will understand a great deal about music and it may be enough for your interests, or you may end up with a library of theory books and sheet music, most manage to get what they want from a few books. Many of the old dead composers wrote great books on harmony, Schoenberg, Piston, and Hindemith are probably the big three, but I will always advocate Schoenberg, the way he combines harmony and composition just works well.

>classical
yikes

>t. ignorant trying to justify his ignorance while pretending not to care

Stop that, that is a moronic question. You are not going to assess their level with a few posts and anyone who asks such a question either lacks basics or is smart enough to realize they could have some things wrong or be missing bits of important information.

Unless you can actually sit down and talk with them so you can accurately judge their knowledge, any answer beyond starting at the beginning is a wrong answer. It is easier to skim over what you know than it is to try and learn when you lack the tools.

you assumed a bit of stuff there huh.
I didn't mean to assess shit, just asked if he was "initiated" or not, a simple question with binary answer, yes or no.

>"initiated"
And that binary answer gives absolutely no useful information to base an answer on. Unless I misunderstood the purpose of your question and you were just asking out of curiosity and not as a prerequisite for your response.

ABRSM publish a two part series called 'The AB Guide to Music Theory.' I've owned them since high school and they've had all I've ever needed to know while learning. Still go back to them when I'm not sure of something.

I know all my major and minor scales and modes, all the intervals, basics of functional harmony (including circle of fifths), chord construction, and a bunch of commonly used jazz devices like passing tones, tritone subs, chromatic inclosure, etc. I know how to read music but I haven't practiced enough at any instrument for my sight reading to become spontaneous. I play guitar, I have some experience with music production, and I used to be able to play a little bit of piano

Thanks man, appreciate it.
I'm tired of playing the same old blues licks on the guitar and I've recently found love for classical music. I'm trying to get into composition, so I'll definitely get the schoenberg book

It sounds like you have picked theory up as you go?

i'd recommend you to go through these lessons: musictheory.net/lessons
if you know all that it will be very quick, I got through all of it in 2 days, did it mostly to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't forgetting anything.
Now I'll probably start the schoenberg's theory of harmony mentioned itt, see what happens. If I like it I'll probably read the other schoenberg book also mentioned here and from there will go to specific routes (jazz harmony, blues harmony, classical ...)

There is no reason to skim that stuff before Schoenberg, won't hurt, but he is complete. I actually have started going back through it a second time, got sucked in after giving a few things a skim for a previous post. I never noticed when I first read it, what he actually teaches you is how to compose your own exercises in harmony, learning harmony and composition are a side effect. looking forward to comparing my notebook from when I first did it to what I do now. Had to leave the book at home tonight, got almost nothing done at work last night because of Schoenberg.

>the other schoenberg book
The other mentioned in this thread, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, is a good book but there may be better. It is a good book but not all inclusive as far as form goes, I suspect he largely leaves the forms specific to counterpoint, such as the fugue, to his book on counterpoint, but I have yet to read that one so can not say for certain. It is a good book and explains the forms covered very well, but I would not compare it to Theory of Harmony in completeness unless his counterpoint book does indeed cover the counterpoint forms, than the three books are a very good and thorough bit of writing and will give a very good bit of knowledge of classical music up to the modernist. I have yet to read his book on atonal work either, all I can say regarding that subject and books is the textbook Atonal Harmony is lacking in many ways, forget who wrote that one.

The biggest thing I got out of his Theory of Harmony is direction and enough knowledge to tell which books would give me the information I was seeking and which where just hype and gimmicks, the understanding of harmony it gave me was great, but these other things have proven very useful!

Did I mention that Fundamentals of Musical Composition is a good book?

Sometimes I really have to question my language skills, best I can offer is I am talking music and repetition is reinforcement!

I still feel ashamed for that bit of writing.

Surprised no one's mentioned Perischetti's Twentieth Century Harmony

>entry level

This should give you the foundation you need for all music and give you better insight into the greatest American art form.

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It is a reference to the experiments in tonality that followed the romantics and assumes you have a very good understanding of theory. You never read Twentieth Century Harmony.

It is a reference book to things common in jazz and nothing more. You either have a complete lack of knowledge in music theory or are Dan Haerle.

what's your recommendation then?

>reference book and nothing more
You clearly just googled the book and looked at the first few page sample. It explains chords, scales and pretty much everything else in music but focusing on Jazz. Once you understand jazz you get (pretty much) everything else.

>creates your musical notation
>BAABAABAAAAABBAAFFFFFFFGGEEEEGGDDDDDDDAAAAAGGGGFFFFFFFEEEEECCCCC

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I am one of the start with Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony fags. Too many never develop a good understanding of harmony, they just learn scales and chords, some analysis, but it is all superficial. If your aspirations are more than the standard fare pop/folk, learn your harmony!

I can not really really give a recommendation for jazz theory, have yet to find one I could call good. Jazz is not an area of primary interest for me, so I just browse the odd book here and there and have taken a few from the library, I keep my eye out for one that will be worth putting in the time, but have yet to see it.

Why not just use a DAW? You'll spend a LOT less time fucking around. Besides you get much better sounds that way.

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This one’s pretty good.

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all these mad crossposters

No, I downloaded it and used it as my breakfast reading, it is on libgen boss. It will not give you the foundation needed for all music, not even the foundation needed for all western music.

You're not going to learn anything about notating music with a DAW.

Good. Musical notation is garbage. If you write music on the staff you're literally getting cucked by dark-age monks.

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The sounds you get out of notation software are not meant to sound good, they are just meant to give you a quick and simple way to audition the score so you can easily check its correctness before printing it out for the band/orchestra.

Let's get real here. How many people here are going to be able to get actual players to play their music?

If they are writing for large orchestras, probably none, if they are writing for small groups, quartets and the like, anyone who puts in the time and legwork. If you put in the time with the small groups you can work your way up to large groups, just need to build a name for yourself, many have done it.

And you can always go the Stuart Sharp route, give up your entire life over a little bit of music stuck in your head, become homeless, learn music theory and compose symphony, get a job and shitty apartment, save up the $2million or so it costs to hire the London Philharmonic to play it. Don't even need to save up anywhere near that much, plenty of much cheaper orchestras out there. Stuarts story is a good one, well worth looking into.

at any rate you can import your midi to a notation program. Sibelius is surprisingly good at identifying enharmonics and such from straight midi. Of course you'll need to adjust some things.

Post it coward.

Also this Sharp guy sucks. This is just a bunch of disjointed movie cues.

you and the other fags sold me schoenberg. I have exactly what you described: knowledge of intervals, scales, chords, I know what they are for but know fuck all what to do with them.
Read the 2 first chapters in which Schoenberg criticizes theorists, tonight will start consonance dissonance.

>I know what they are for but know fuck all what to do with them.

que?

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I have an ideia what they are for but I don't have enough (or at all) knowledge of harmony to apply that in my playing whatsoever. It's all pretty much useless without knowing harmony, which I suppose is what connect all those things.
>queijo

But if you understand what scales and chords are for (not just what they are) then you should know you get chords out of the scale by skipping a degree for each note and that the chords can be put end to end to form progressions.

Way to ignore his accomplishment.

While I am not a fan of his work, what he did is amazing.

Good job on not just skipping to the Major Mode and Diatonic Chords as most seem to. Those first three chapters can come across as self important justifications or ranting, but they really explain the method of the text and provide some good information as well.

That is the exact simplified, dumbed down view of harmony that books like The Jazz Language proliferate. There is so much more going on. Schoenberg does not spend 400 odd pages explaining what most books do in 10 or 20 because he is pedantic.

No, what he did is incredibly mediocre. I could care less about the reality-TVbait story of his life. He's not even a half-decent composer.

that's what he criticizes in the first chapters. What base have you for saying that? A system created by people and that everybody chooses to agree with but couldn't come with a good reason for saying why it sucks?

I thought we were talking about Sharp, not Schoenberg. Schoenberg is based.

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my retardation, sorry

Hanon's The Virtuoso Pianist is the quintessential book on technique. For Jazz, Mark Levine's Jazz Piano Book. Source: I'm a piano student with a really strict but extremely successful South Korean pianist/composer