Best Way to Learn Music
Music has been an important part of a human life for thousands of years. Over the time, new ideas have been introduced, new tools to produce music, and so on. With so much information online, it is hard for a beginner to decide how to start. How do we start?
Let's divide the process into several steps, and describe the right order of these steps :)
1. Basics of Music Theory (4 hours to learn)
We recommend you to try our interactive guide at jampea.com/learn, wehre you can learn all the basics of theory. Try to read it slowly and carefully, spend at least an hour on each article, to make sure you understand all the concepts :)
2. Writing Down Music - no notation (2+ hours to learn)
Mandatory steps: 1
We have a tool Jampea.com, where you can write down your musical ideas (choose instruments, speed of playing, melody, chords, drums, etc.) and let your computer play it (described in Article 1 and Article 2). You can also open music made by others to study it. Later, you can switch to advanced tools, such as FL Studio, Ableton Live, and so on.
3. Musical Notation (6+ hours)
Mandatory steps: 1
The classic notation is probably even more complex than the basics of the music theory. It is often taught simultaneously, resulting into 10+ hours of struggle. E.g. moving a note one step vertically changes it by a tone in some cases, and by a semitone in other cases. Students learn names of different clefs, without even undestanding what an octave is.
We believe that it is better to learn the theory without notes first. Only then, you can learn the rules of notation e.g. here. Then, you can write music using the notation either on paper, or digitally using software such as Musescore, Guitar Pro or Finale.
4. Playing an instrument - improvising (10+ hours)
Mandatory steps: 1
Once you know the basic of theory, and you know how to make your instrument produce various tones and sounds, you can start practicing to play that instrument. You can play what comes to your head (while following the rules of a scale that you chose, to play chords and melodies), or you can play existing music, if you know chords (you can choose your own way to play these chords).
If you improvise and create a piece of music, you must do the step 2 or 3, to write it down, to be able to play it the same way again in the future, or offer it to someone else to play.
5. Playing an instrument - play as it was written (10+ hours)
Mandatory steps: 1 and 3
You can often find sheet music, where a specific piece is described in detail, which allows us to play it exactly as the creator wanted it to be played. In that case, it is necessary to know the meaning of the music notation (3), to find each note on your instrument. But you should also know "what is going on" in terms of music theory (1).
6. Precise instructions (tabs, videos) on how to play a song
Beginners often enjoy playing according to videos with "notes dropping on a piano", or using tabulatures to play the guitar. They are amazing, as they tell you exactly what to do (place this finger here, then, this finger here, and so on), and you hear your favourite song instantly.
While you play with dropping notes or with tabs, you will feel frightened, as there are hundreds of sounds, which you must play in a specific order (very hard to remember), and being able to come up with this music feels like a rocket science. But we still recommend you to learn at least the theory in step 1, which will help you realize useful facts:
- The hundreds of notes that you play are just two to six different chords, ordered in a specific pattern, that is repeating. Each chord is played in a similar way as all others.
- When you omit a few notes from the chord and don't play them, it is "no big deal" (adding one wrong note is much worse).
- Almost a half of piano keys (in between the played keys) is never played (the music uses one specific scale). In tabulatures, only a few numbers occur on each string (if you play frets 2 and 4 on some string, you probably never play frets 1, 3 or 5 on the same string).
- You will start to see similarities between different songs.
