Ravenspiral Guide updated!

[k-bird]

The Ravenspiral Guide has been updated today after more than a year of stasis to version 0.4.2!

For those of you who don't know about this idiosyncratic primer on music theory, you're missing out on one of the funniest and most informative resources freely available for the amateur musician. It's for the sort of composer who knows anywhere from a little bit to a lot about music theory through picking things up here and there, and wants to learn a bit more about composition without having to squint at traditional music notation, learn about Neapolitan chords or be addressed by academic toffs who were actually fooled into thinking serialism was clever.

Rather than taking an authoritative slant of 'thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not', this guide introduces the reader to concepts such as secondary dominant sevenths and then quickly encourages the reader to go off in complete defiance of traditional music theory to abuse them in whatever way sounds good. It frumpily ignores certain aspects of music theory for being impractical and complicated and suggests you go and read a proper book to learn about them. It dares to label some chords as utterly useless and other chords as really good fun, making subjective value judgements about them instead of blandly pretending that all chords are equally useful.

In short, it's the guide to music theory for the rest of us. It's a free download in PDF format, making it nicely self-contained in one simple file.

Check it out at http://www.ravenspiral.com/ravenspiralguide.pdf

[whyterabbyt]

Ta

[speccyteccy]

Thanks for this - I remember find the first issue really useful, and I think my theory skills could benefit from some more study.

[Mental Audio Deviations]

thank you

[k-bird]

The Guide was updated again tonight with more on chord substitutions, modulation and other stuff.