What one bit of Music Theory was really helpful that caused your songwriting to improve ?

Chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
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IncarnateX wrote: It hardly makes sense to say that it is oh so good for our creativity if we forget at the level of procedural knowledge too because that equals never having learned anything in the first place.
Again, I think you're taking the word 'forget' too literally in this context.

Riding a bike is a good, simple example of procedural knowledge...I could ride a bike very well as a teenager / young adult, but after the brief few learning weeks, I NEVER consciously thought about what I was doing...I just did it...often in an unexpected and slightly dangerous way on certain days! :0)

'Forgetting' in the context of composing simply means that certain things, (more for some people and less for others) are so ingrained that they rarely think about them consciously.

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tehlord wrote:I didn't actually make music for about a decade after I learned all the theory I learned so it's difficult to say.

But....

I would say that theory is very, very overrated. I don't remember a thing from what I learned.

What works, is learning to be a musician. Starting with scales, moving on to the brain/muscle connection that comes with actually reading and playing music and probably most importantly the instinctive learning of intervals, and the musical phrases they can conjure up.

Scales and interval ear training would always be my first recommendation to anybody. There's a reason they teach that first.
Scales = music theory

Interval training = music theory

Reading music = music theory

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IncarnateX wrote: It hardly makes sense to say that it is oh so good for our creativity if we forget at the level of procedural knowledge too because that equals never having learned anything in the first place.
It doesn't make sense the way you put it, no.

procedural... I actually don't even have note names in my mind in the first sessions for my original music, it's all shapes and distances; I do things and then I have to see about what it is to arrange from it. It's freedom. I shall reiterate the Sonny Rollins quote "You can't think and play at the same time." One can interpret that in the same fashion and act like it's stupid, absurd. Does he make no sense, as an improviser? We have to read between the lines. Words really are insufficient to convey the subtlety of this area or level. Miles to McLaughlin: Play the guitar like you don't know how to play the guitar.
McLaughlin is very likely to have done something with that on that record. JM was doing a lot of funky, angular, kind of abstract cubistic rhythm guitar in those days.

Here's a way to look at that statement: lose your habits, get out of your own ass, don't try to impress with your scales and dexterity, don't think with your fingers...

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ChamMusic wrote:
IncarnateX wrote: It hardly makes sense to say that it is oh so good for our creativity if we forget at the level of procedural knowledge too because that equals never having learned anything in the first place.
Again, I think you're taking the word 'forget' too literally in this context.


And here I was thinking that you did (along with others it seems). Well, nothing to see then, let the thread move on. :arrow:

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Research in brain damage confirms the effects of procedural knowledge btw. One famous example suffered from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He could not remember long back before his damage and he could not create new memories, always trapped in here and now, same day, same hour. Really sad beyond belief. What a prison of mind. However, when he sat down in front of the piano he found to his surprise again and again that he could read notes and play rather good. He became know as Clive and in this video at about 2.40 you can see what he is able to do without any explicit knowledge of where he learned it and no permanent memories afterwards that he had just played.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrmsK6jtjc

Clive had no living chance to use his procedural knowledge to do something differently, he would not be able to analyse anything if he wanted to and that is what makes a difference in comparison to a working memory. Even if we forget, we have potential to recall semantic knowledge when we are given the right cues, e.g. reading long forgotten textbooks again. To make changes to habits, we first need to be aware of them and then change our behavior consciously. Clive could not do this because semantic memory is the key to just that.

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IncarnateX wrote:
ChamMusic wrote:
IncarnateX wrote: It hardly makes sense to say that it is oh so good for our creativity if we forget at the level of procedural knowledge too because that equals never having learned anything in the first place.
Again, I think you're taking the word 'forget' too literally in this context.


And here I was thinking that you did (along with others it seems). Well, nothing to see then, let the thread move on. :arrow:
Sorry, I genuinely don't understand your point here...you were thinking that I did what?

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IncarnateX wrote:Research in brain damage confirms the effects of procedural knowledge btw. One famous example suffered from both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He could not remember long back before his damage and he could not create new memories, always trapped in here and now, same day, same hour. Really sad beyond belief. What a prison of mind. However, when he sat down in front of the piano he found to his surprise again and again that he could read notes and play rather good. He became know as Clive and in this video at about 2.40 you can see what he is able to do without any explicit knowledge of where he learned it and no permanent memories afterwards that he had just played.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrmsK6jtjc

Clive had no living chance to use his procedural knowledge to do something differently, he would not be able to analyse anything if he wanted to and that is what makes a difference in comparison to a working memory. Even if we forget, we have potential to recall semantic knowledge when we are given the right cues, e.g. reading long forgotten textbooks again. To make changes to habits, we first need to be aware of them and then change our behavior consciously. Clive could not do this because semantic memory is the key to just that.
Research into brain damage is multifaceted, contradictory and confusing...each new study often 'proves' something different...very little in this area is concrete at all. Not that I really understood the point of your example: having briefly looked the case up, it's clearly open to huge debate amongst many experts who all interpet it very differently at times.

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Language is at times inadequate and I think this is one of those times. For me it is.

One develops all sorts of vocabulary in preparation for *the moment*; so 'lose your habits' cannot be absolute. But 'don't let your fingers think for you' maybe fills that in a bit. Let's look at it from a musician that doesn't have their fingers involved: a singer. So a singer may be able to match every note with the sound that comes out of her head, but in improvisation, who has time to do both? I really think naming things in the moment is a waste of precious time mentally and possibly an absolute squander.

Some musical climates are perfectly obvious, someone calls a key, or one even recognizes the climate by ear. I did a piece I'm happy with where I determined something on the order of a raga (three of them in fact) so here there is a definite, conscious limit. But one develops the composition in terms of shapes. Zig zag is one way to put it, this move after the other move is 'correct'. But the thing here is SHAPES, you cannot run scales and that be satisfactory. You develop a familiarity with the compositional materials you decide on to the extent you just act; to the extent of a high chance your impulse will be right.


A good example of this is the guy who was my favorite local player when I was just starting to get to where people thought I was doing something. George Shaw. He didn't know anything to talk about it. He had no time for music theory. He played totally by ear. He played in the advanced, post-bop vocabulary, yet he didn't know names of things for shit; he shrugged it off. That's the goal. He was born differently than I, but that's action beyond thinking.
Last edited by jancivil on Tue Sep 11, 2018 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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jancivil wrote: Miles to McLaughlin: Play the guitar like you don't know how to play the guitar.
McLaughlin is very likely to have done something with that on that record. JM was doing a lot of funky, angular, kind of abstract cubistic rhythm guitar in those days.
Interview a few years ago with JM:

Q: There's a story about your lyrical playing on [1969's] "In a Silent Way" that implies you were baffled as to what Miles Davis wanted on the recording. Can you describe the session?

A: Since Miles had invited me to the session only the previous evening [Feb. 17, 1969], I was very nervous. It was the last thing I'd expected on arrival in New York [he’d left England earlier that month]. ‘In a Silent Way’ was Joe Zawinul's tune, and he'd made an arrangement that Miles didn't like too much after we'd run it down a couple of times. Miles asked me to play it solo, and Joe had given me a copy of the piano score since he'd no time to write a guitar part. So I said to Miles that I needed a minute to read the piano score since he wanted both chords and melody at the same time. Miles didn't like that and said I should play it "like I don't know how to play guitar" (verbatim). This is the equivalent of a Zen master giving one of his students a Koan, and an instant resolution of it! After a few seconds I threw caution to the winds, and literally threw all the chords out, and the rhythm also. Even if you don't know how to play guitar, most everybody knows the E chord. I played that one chord and played the melody around it. Miles had already got the red light on, and at the end he really liked what happened. In fact he liked it so much, he put it as the first and last track on side one!

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Right. I remember that interview. Is it on video?

That is Zen.

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jancivil wrote:Right. I remember that interview. Is it on video?

That is Zen.
Maybe not the exact same one...JM often talked about that recording session as he regarded it as one of those 'moments' that genuinely changed his attitude towards his music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sB5UkrkMu4

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ChamMusic wrote: Research into brain damage is multifaceted, contradictory and confusing...each new study often 'proves' something different...very little in this area is concrete at all. Not that I really understood the point of your example: having briefly looked the case up, it's clearly open to huge debate amongst many experts who all interpet it very differently at times.
I can believe that this is confusing to you but as far Clive goes, I know of no doubt that he could play without knowing that he could and not remembering afterwards. His anterograde amnesia is well documented and there was a documentary once that showed how he would be surprised that he could play an organ in a church. So I would plz ask you to show where you looked him up that made you in doubt that he had retrograde and anterograde amnesia but could play. Wiki says so, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing. Textbooks say so, I learned so and watched the documentary, so now I am excited as to what new you can bring that makes it all very confusing and invalid for that reason. And he is not the only case but one of the most famous because his anterograde amnesia was so servere. Lots of neuroscientic evidence and cognitive psychological experiments confirm this division of memory. Every science is multifacetted but that does not mean it is not valid in many specific cases, if not most of them. You know, when people start to reject neuroscience on basis of feelings in their toes, I am off and so are the neuroscientists, so I hope you can come up with some more specific info.

And my point, well you make it, I just show you how memory works, then you can decide which type is importent to you or not. But at the end of the day, I’d say there are limits to what we really can forget without the ability to recollect and if we want to change our behavior we would need semantic as well as procedural memory. Make of it what you like.

And good heavens in general! We are certainly living in times where well documentet scientific evidence can be rejected with a fart on the internet. Yes, I know, even for a case a well documented as Clive’s, cognitive test, brain scans, observations of behavior and statistics = fake news because my ass does not agree (and I do not need to ask it why, I know it is right per default).
Last edited by IncarnateX on Wed Sep 12, 2018 12:37 am, edited 2 times in total.

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:)
Last edited by woggle on Fri Mar 01, 2019 7:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Well, Woggle, we are both into neuroscience from an academic perspective and know it is not something to be settled on an arbitrary internet forum but in the laboratories and by field studies. However, some cases are useful to learn even in a music forum like this when discussing to which extent it is cool to forget music theory in the long run. Price is that we know that facts will be ignored if people for some reason find this info threatening to them. Why on Earth such a tragic case as Clive’s has to be rejected swiftly in the first place is a mystery to me. I did not provide the info to attack someone but mainly to provide some categories of memory to discuss that makes sense. If you blur these division, you may lose important distinctions that blur your message too.

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:)
Last edited by woggle on Fri Mar 01, 2019 7:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

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