Re: Music theory question
Sweet try. But I call bull**** wherever it may be
Theory does'nt strengthen your ear ..an over-reliance on it weakens it (like using a crutch unnessesarily to walk). My experience is the exact opposite. People who do nothing but spout tons of unnessesary theoretical nonsense usually surprise you with their playing (and not in a good way..). If I were to guess its some form of over-compensation. Who cares?
In my case I'm comfortable with my 'ignorance' (ie having a different approach) Nothing is simpler than having stuff pop into your head & being able to translate that down to fingers in real time. You should try it ..it's great fun
You're taking this way more personally than intended. Before this I had no idea about your approach to playing, or pretty much anything about you, really. If theory does not help develop your ear, then virtually every accredited institution teaching music is wrong (well, western music, anyway – I can't speak with certainty about other traditions), as these fields are usually taught in a very integrated way – in my opinion for good reason. I should perhaps add that guitarists generally learn theory very poorly. Scales, for instance, is only a tiny fragment of theory, yet this seems to be what people focus much of their time on. Once you start looking beyond this, and looking into the different types of dissonances and the ways to resolve them, functional and extended harmony, counterpoint, the construction of melody, melodic/harmonic groupings, rhythmic studies, form etc. I would say that you probably can't help but strengthen your ears. Just like theory is not just scales, ear training is a lot more than plucking chords by ear.
For what it is worth, I frequently translate ideas in my head to my hands. What would make you think otherwise? But learning theory has shaped the way I hear things, and opened me to ideas and concepts I was previously oblivious to. What is more, I can also use theoretical concepts as a way to explore ideas. To take a relatively simple example, a lot of music I listen to use movements between perfect fourths and fifths to tritones. One day I decided to try to chart the way these are used in the examples I was thinking of, and to see what other ways I could use them. In most of these cases, the tritone was used as a passing tone or an auxillary tone to a power chord that worked as a stand-in for a normal triad from the scale at work; in other words as a diminished auxillary dominant. However, I also found that once the idea was used as secondary dominants to more distant harmonies, the feeling of the chord changed dramatically. I also looked at how the same permutations could be used to resolve to different harmonies (the diminished seventh chord is a symmetrical chord, and its identity is therefore best understood after its resolution), to create different effects. Finally, I looked at how one could stretch the concept out over a longer span of time, and use the diminished-fifth concept as a way of organizing both chord progressions and melodies.
I suspect you will brand this as "unnecessary theoretical nonsense", and to an extent I agree that it is unnecessary. There is, after all, nothing here that I couldn't have come up with by ear, at least in theory. At the same time, I developed a lot of new ideas from this this relatively simple thought experiment, which in turn have seeped into my own ideas, so there have been tangible musical benefits to me. I certainly do not claim to be a musical genius in any way, but I find those skills to be highly worthwhile, and to be of great benefit to my musicianship.
Oh, and having a theoretical foundation allows me to explain ideas such as these to other people far more efficiently than I would otherwise, but that is another aspect of the discussion.
