(August 26, 2017 at 7:01 pm)Hammy Wrote: I may not know any theory but even I know that tunes don't just go up and down... sometimes you do go from A to G for instance...
Which is going a step down a scale. And nobody said that you can only go up and down a scale one step at a time. Changing from C3 to F3 is going a perfect fourth up a scale, B4 to D4 is going a major third down a scale, and so forth. So yes - all melody is going up and down one scale or another, by varied intervals.
(August 26, 2017 at 7:01 pm)Hammy Wrote: Actually, learning music theory has been known to create a lot of mental blocks in a person because it's hard to know when to break the rules when you've followed them over and over.
"It has been known"? Source, please. And even if that's true - training has been known to cause a lot of injuries; that doesn't mean that people who don't train are better sportsmen. Sure, the less you know about what you're doing - the less self-conscious you are about it, so it feels better for you. The more you learn -
the more you realize how much more there is yet to know, which can be discouraging. It's just Dunning-Kruger effect at work.
(August 26, 2017 at 7:01 pm)Hammy Wrote: It's no surprise, IMO, that my two favorite musicians are self taught and didn't learn any theory.
How do you know your favorite musicians didn't learn any theory? I am self taught, I taught myself a lot of theory - and am continuing to do so. And I outright reject the notion, that any self-respecting musician, who has been playing for a while - especially professionally - has not learned a whole bunch of theory along the way. It's just what you do - if you have to learn the same 3 chords all over again, every time you write a new song, you're unlikely to ever create anything more advanced than a 3-chord song.
(August 26, 2017 at 7:01 pm)Hammy Wrote: Classically taught musicians often all sound the same. [...]
LOL... So do musicians, who don't know anything about music and are constantly "discovering new grounds", that have been known for ages and explored ad nauseam. Besides, any music you're not into will "sound the same" to you, regardless of how much skill, knowledge, effort or emotion went into making it... And at the end of the day - there's a whole middle ground, you don't seem to be taking into account, where the vast majority of musicians find themselves - having some idea of how music works is not the same as being a Berklee College academic robot.
Nobody's saying you must learn music theory, especially when you're making music as a hobby, but I'm not sure why you feel the need to present ignorance as a virtue. Sure - there may be some extremely talented people, who can intuitively comprehend music, without having to consciously study it, and who can create impressive, original art "by feel" alone. But the rest of us need to learn and hone our craft, if we want our efforts to be appealing to an audience.
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
