Not at all - not consciously at least. I don't dislike music theory - I quite enjoyed learning it in school actually, but it's like grammar without being like grammar, meaning: you don't really ever think grammar when speaking (or writing), but sometimes, when writing, you might have the voice of your English teacher hammering on about split infinitives - for instance.
And while music is a language, it is not like grammar in the sense that you can break whatever musical grammatical "rules" to express what you want - as long as it sounds good.
My first day in music school, my first class actually, this great trumpet player called Greg Hopkins slid into the classroom Seinfeld-Kramer style (he looked like Kramer too - albeit in a smaller frame, all white hair and glasses). I was seating in the front row, and he put a finger in my face, and I mean an inch away from my nose, and said: "Whatever sounds good, USE!"
This was my first Harmony class ever - and he was a great teacher - and I never forgot his advice. In fact, I've applied it to many other things in life.
To give this reply a bit more perspective: some of us composers, myself included, barely even think of proper chord names anymore. Pianists especially (and I believe guitarists also), think in terms of shapes and colors - and bass notes (the same chord voicing can have many different bass notes anchoring it, and serving different functions, but it's the same chord!).
This was confirmed to me by a friend of mine who played bass for Herbie Hancock once - he was watching Herbie play something, and asked him to play a short section again. He told Herbie, "Oh yeah, I see what you're doing with (whatever the name of the chord was)," and Herbie was confused. It took him a couple of seconds to switch on his "music theory brain" and agree that the chord could be called that. He was obviously long past chord names - as many of us composers are.
Don't get me wrong: we can read sheet music and chord charts, we know the names, but the relationship we have with those chords on our instrument and in our compositions transcends whatever music theory says they should be called.
How much does music theory really shape your compositions?
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- KVRAF
- 4218 posts since 10 Oct, 2002 from Nashville, TN USA
I had a strange (or perhaps common) origin in music. I absolutely loved folk and easy-rock ballads, as well as all the 80s metal, 70s classic rock, and progressive rock stuff. I still love all the cool 70s songs like Chevy Van and Time in a Bottle.
So, as a burgeoning, terrible guitar player, I would crank away on two-chord vamps on acoustic guitar and try to make modal type melodies with my voice or bounce ideas between two boom boxes that could record. At other times, I would fire up a drum machine and riff out to it with metal-isms, coming up with fairly catchy riffs—that was my one super power at the time, and that eventually made its way into Tascam cassette 4-track experiments in production/arrangement.
The guys I jammed with were perfectly fine with us chaining together riffs without much knowledge of how or why things worked. We'd have these seven-minute songs that were essentially grab bags of riffs. The meanest-sounding one kinda became the "chorus," though none of us were thinking about form in a sane manner, yet. Being "heavy" was SO important to us back then. That, and making as much as possible live in odd time signatures. I'm sure it was all nearly unlistenable in terms of form. I still have a few of those riffs in my memory, one in particular that was in 5/4. Heavy as can be and would hold up for me even now.
Later, diatonic harmony would frame everything for me, and I'd try very hard to make sure every tune had a proper bridge. I'm a "if you can't get it done in four minutes," you're failing kind of guy now, more or less*. When you need that bridge to really be "another room," knowing how to use the ii chord or the VII chord really started to spark nice outcomes. Riffs, melody and timbre are still more important to me than chords (though they are always implied).|
*Allowing more time for cool intros, additional solo sections, or something like that. But, basically, pop/rock classic forms where the main ideas are expressed in about four minutes.
So, as a burgeoning, terrible guitar player, I would crank away on two-chord vamps on acoustic guitar and try to make modal type melodies with my voice or bounce ideas between two boom boxes that could record. At other times, I would fire up a drum machine and riff out to it with metal-isms, coming up with fairly catchy riffs—that was my one super power at the time, and that eventually made its way into Tascam cassette 4-track experiments in production/arrangement.
The guys I jammed with were perfectly fine with us chaining together riffs without much knowledge of how or why things worked. We'd have these seven-minute songs that were essentially grab bags of riffs. The meanest-sounding one kinda became the "chorus," though none of us were thinking about form in a sane manner, yet. Being "heavy" was SO important to us back then. That, and making as much as possible live in odd time signatures. I'm sure it was all nearly unlistenable in terms of form. I still have a few of those riffs in my memory, one in particular that was in 5/4. Heavy as can be and would hold up for me even now.
Later, diatonic harmony would frame everything for me, and I'd try very hard to make sure every tune had a proper bridge. I'm a "if you can't get it done in four minutes," you're failing kind of guy now, more or less*. When you need that bridge to really be "another room," knowing how to use the ii chord or the VII chord really started to spark nice outcomes. Riffs, melody and timbre are still more important to me than chords (though they are always implied).|
*Allowing more time for cool intros, additional solo sections, or something like that. But, basically, pop/rock classic forms where the main ideas are expressed in about four minutes.
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- KVRAF
- 4218 posts since 10 Oct, 2002 from Nashville, TN USA
I like that observation.cryophonik wrote: Sat May 30, 2026 11:03 pm About 100 years ago when I was in my first year as a music major, I recall my first composition prof using an analogy that went something like “music theory is the language, composition is the poetry” and I’ve heard a few other variations since then, but that always stuck with me. Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive.
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machinesworking machinesworking https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=8505 - KVRAF
- 8075 posts since 15 Aug, 2003 from seattle
I like probably most of us learned the basics in school. Then immediately started playing in bands. I don't know if I regret my method or not? I tend to like fairly simple song formats with odd time signatures in arcane scales. So because I'm only familiar intimately with the basics I will reverse engineer the scale I'm in, thus setting up a basis as to where to go with the other parts of a song. I 100% find theory helpful though, a reverse scale finder online saves my ass constantly. I do not think at all about theory when coming up with parts though. The closest I come is going 'eh I'm playing in Phrygian again... seems to be a default setting.