Music Theory Made Simple: Essential Concepts for Budding Composers, Musicians and Music Lovers

By Adrian Valia

Music Will Never Sound the Same Again

No longer will music theory be an intimidating notion! Whether you’re new to music and want to know the fundamentals to succeed, or whether you already play, sing and write and need a refresher on the basics, multi-instrumentalist Adrian Valia has you covered. From melody and rhythm all the way to the most essential elements of harmony, you’ll learn—or relearn!—everything you need to know in order to understand and make profound and beautiful tunes.

Using the same colorful graphics and illustrations made popular in his beloved “Music Visually Explained” series on TikTok, Adrian breaks down concepts like polyrhythm, scales, power chords and the puzzling Circle of Fifths into easily digestible forms. What’s more, tools that spin and move on the page demonstrate melody and rhythm in real-time for a fun, interactive flair, as do quizzes and QR codes that lead to video demonstrations. With this book in hand, you’ll soon be on your way to making the songs you’ve always dreamed of.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781645675914

Book preview

Essential Concepts for Musicians, Budding Composers and Music Lovers

Music Theory

Made Simple

Adrian Valia

Creator of the Music Visually Explained series on TikTok

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

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To my beautiful family and friends.

This book is yours.

Foreword

As a child, I wished I had a simple vocabulary to make sense of what I was hearing. Even at that age, prior to any formal musical education, I could detect that something was notable about a song I was listening to at any given moment. But what exactly was notable? I knew I felt it—I just didn’t know what it was.

Music is an absolute joy to experience. But still, that fact alone was unsatisfying to my curious ear. I knew music was fun to listen to, but that didn’t explain the feelings I would get from certain songs. The feelings seemed a bit more specific than simply fun or joy and they seemed to be tied to timepoints in the song where something musical would change.

Over the years, I took piano lessons, played percussion in middle and high school marching and concert bands and played piano at my local church. At university, I took several semesters of music theory, played in the orchestra as a percussionist and played in jazz bands as a pianist. I built up an arsenal of music knowledge and developed ways of retroactively understanding the prior 15 years of my musical life.

Great! I now had all the tools I needed to answer all of the what is this feeling? questions I’d had over the years. Indeed, nothing was quite as satisfying as finally resolving a lot of those unanswered questions I’d had since I was a child.

Then, my hindsight bias would kick in—my feelings were there all along! I would’ve understood all of this—roman numeral analysis, secondary dominants, chord extensions, chord substitutions, modal interchange, blah blah music theory stuff—as a child, if only somebody had shared these secrets with me!

But, no, that wouldn’t have worked. I wouldn’t have been able to explain theories of tonal organization to my 5-year-old self, using words that he wouldn’t even be able to pronounce or write yet, much less begin to understand. So, does that mean that a child could never know the reasons behind their musical feelings? Do they have to wait until they reach university level academics to get closer to any real understanding of those feelings?

Remarkable mentors and teachers are those who are able to distill complex realities and theories into digestible pieces for learners. As long as a child, or any learner really, is under one of these mentors or teachers, they do not have to wait until they mature to a higher academic level to understand everything intuitively. It’s good news that there are remarkable mentors and teachers out there and I am proud to say that Adrian Valia is among them.

Here, Adrian has provided a new, fun and easy way of understanding the ins and outs of music. Using visuals without conventional music notation, Adrian shines a new light and provides a refreshing take on topics found in traditional music theory: rhythm, melody and harmony. What’s noteworthy is how approachable he’s made it. You don’t need a background in music theory or in playing an instrument. If you’ve tapped your foot, sung in the shower, danced at a party or felt an emotion with music before, that’s all you need for this book!

Music theory education is notoriously controversial on internet chat forums. Arguments abound on whether or not it stifles creativity or whether it unlocks creativity to an unlimited level. On top of that, some students of music theory may find themselves lost in its deep interconnected web of topics, or worse, they may find themselves burnt out from learning about music, their one passion. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Music theory shouldn’t be harder than it needs to be and it shouldn’t take away from what’s most important of all: the music.

Like with all of his visually engaging TikToks and Instagram videos on rhythmic and harmonic concepts, Adrian makes sure the learner has fun experiencing the music alongside the information. I want to thank Adrian for writing the book I wish I had as a young music student. I wouldn’t have had to wait so long to know exactly what I was feeling in the music.

—Emmanuel de Leon, Creator of Leon Waves

Introduction

I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember.

Even though I didn’t know much about it, somehow it was always there for me.

My parents weren’t musicians, but my father had the biggest CD collection I had ever seen. We would spend hours listening to Queen, Scott Joplin, Tchaikovsky and everything in between. Gosh, I loved those listening sessions.

What I didn’t love so much was music theory. I started playing classical piano in fifth grade and I had a hard time understanding music notation and fancy terminology—I just wanted to make music! With my instrument and my creativity, I had everything that I needed to get started, so I stopped taking lessons for a while.

It wasn’t long until I started bumping up against my own limitations. All my songs sounded the same and even though I could hear what I liked, I couldn’t really make sense of it and use it at will.

That’s when I rediscovered music theory and began to love making music again.

You see, for a long time I thought music theory would tell me what to do and immediately dry out my creativity. I don’t think I’m the only one who thought like this at some point.

I can’t really blame myself—some of the books and teachers I was exposed to were very opinionated, with a clear idea of what music should be. There was always a right and a wrong, and that idea simply didn’t click for me.

It wasn’t until I discovered what music theory really was about that I started using it to expand my creativity.

One day, I heard an accomplished musician compare music with language. He said music and a spoken language weren’t different and that they shouldn’t be treated differently either. This intrigued me.

He continued explaining—when we learn a language, we don’t expect the grammar to teach us what to say; we expect it to help us understand the language better and to show us how to communicate with others more clearly. We’d never detach grammar from its use in a spoken language, so why do that with music? Now this made sense.

A whole world of possibilities opened up before me, allowing me to use and manipulate elements of music in a way I had never thought possible. I started seeing musical concepts as opportunities to become a better, less limited musician. The walls of theory became bridges for my musical development and I haven’t looked back since then.

Today, I keep discovering amazing concepts, learning music by my favorite musicians with ease, and I’ve even invented new musical terms and concepts along the way—my younger self would never have believed it.

So, what really is music theory? For me, it’s a set of tools that allows you to understand and articulate the language of music. Once you’re familiar with these tools, you can use them to suit your own views and create more beautiful art. That’s it. This book is not about judging your art, but giving you tools that will help you communicate your ideas and empower you to create more.

The more you learn about music theory, the quicker you’ll be able to recognize patterns in music, which will allow you to memorize songs faster, recall melodies instantly and become a more confident musician overall—a fluent speaker, if you will.

So there you have it. Whether you are a guitar hobbyist, an aspiring singer, a composer or just someone curious about how music works, music theory is a fascinating subject that will help you understand and create music on a whole new level.

I sincerely hope this book begins a long-lasting friendship between you and music theory, or at least inspires you to create something new!

Wishing you all the best in your musical journey,

Sincerely,

Adrian

How This Book Works

This book is divided into three chapters: Rhythm, Melody and Harmony¹.

The first chapter explores the horizontal axis of music, or how sound occurs in time.

The next two chapters explore the vertical axis of music, which deals with pitch, or how high or low a sound is.

Don’t worry—we’ll learn more about them soon.

These chapters will be divided into sections, which will teach you different concepts and techniques you can use to manipulate each element. The concepts lead into each other and get progressively harder, so read everything in order if you don’t want to get confused.

Concepts will be explained and referenced as they come up throughout the book. With that said, if you read a word that you don’t know or you can’t remember what it means, quickly check out the Glossary at the end of the book here—most terminology and some additional information can be found there.

The next thing you should know about this book is that it doesn’t focus on traditional Western music notation.

In case you didn’t know, music notation is a visual system used to read and write music. It contains various symbols—like the treble clef, displayed below—that allow musicians to read music in a linear manner.

Although learning how to read traditional music notation is a valuable skill, the process is quite long and tedious. In this book, we’ll primarily use shapes and letters, along with some traditional symbols to explain concepts, which will make the learning process quicker. You don’t need to know how to read traditional music notation in order to learn music theory, which is why that won’t be the focus of this book. For notation book recommendations, check out the QR code included in