Chapters
Complete Music Theory Course
A course that assumes nothing and builds in sequence, each idea explained and then heard in the playback dock.
19 Chapters
Sound
Fundamentals of Music Theory
Learn the basic building blocks of music: sound, pitch, rhythm, and the elements that make music work
Pitch, Notes and the Octave
What pitch is, how the twelve notes repeat every octave, and how they get their names.
Rhythm, Beat and Tempo
The pulse under every piece of music: beat, tempo, note values and how bars organize time.
Reading Music: The Staff
The five-line staff, treble and bass clefs, ledger lines, printed note values and accidentals — enough notation to read a line of music.
Materials
Intervals
Understand the distances between notes and how they create harmony and melody
Training Your Ear
Develop your musical ear and sight-reading skills through systematic practice
Scales: Major and Minor
Explore major and minor scales, modal systems, and exotic scales from around the world
Keys and Key Signatures
What a key is, why key signatures exist, and how the circle of fifths ties every key together.
Modes
The seven modes of the major scale, their character notes, and how to hear and use each one.
Harmony
Chords: Triads and Sevenths
Build and understand triads, seventh chords, and extended harmonies
Diatonic Harmony
How chords built in a key relate to each other: roman numerals, harmonic function and cadences.
Voice Leading
Writing smooth motion between chords: avoiding parallels, shaping bass lines and using non-chord tones.
Melody: Motif, Phrase and Line
What makes a melody work: contour, motif development, phrase structure and melodic tendency.
Chromatic Harmony
Secondary dominants, borrowed chords, modulation, the Neapolitan and augmented sixths, and how to analyse a chromatic passage.
Shape
Meter, Syncopation and Groove
How bars are counted and what players do against the count: time signatures, accent, syncopation, swing, polyrhythm and odd meters.
Form and Structure
How a piece is put together: phrase, period and section, binary and ternary form, song forms, sonata form and rondo, and how to analyse it.
Applied
Theory in Styles
Chord-scale thinking, jazz harmony, pop chord loops, the theory already inside a DAW, and the traditions this course does not describe.
Arranging and Instrumentation
Register, texture, doubling and blend, laying out a small ensemble, and a reference table of the instrument families and their ranges.
Putting It Together
An eight-step procedure for analysing a song, three worked analyses, and the same questions turned round to compose, improvise and perform.
Questions
- What order should I learn music theory in?
- In parts, each building on the last: sound (what music is made of, pitch, rhythm, notation), then materials (intervals, ear training, scales, keys, modes), then harmony (chords through chromatic harmony), then shape (meter, form), and finally applied (styles, arranging, analysis).
- I already know some theory. Where do I start?
- Open the chapter you want. Each one lists what it assumes and links back to it, so a gap shows up as a named link rather than as confusion. Prerequisites are shown, never enforced — no chapter is locked, and nothing has to be completed first.
- Is music theory a set of rules?
- Mostly not, and the course labels which is which. Every claim is marked as a fact, a naming convention, a stylistic tendency or a written constraint, and tendencies and constraints always state whose music they describe. A non-diatonic chord is not an error.
Where to start
Chapter one assumes no notation and no instrument. If you already read music, skip to the topic you came for.