Reddit reviews Tonal Harmony, with an Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music

My suggestion is to learn on your own, and if you choose to go to college, pursue a major that has more profitable career options. Minor in music theory and invest your free time in practicing your instrument. Here is a reading list I recommend to start getting into serious music study and guitar playing:

• William Leavitt's Modern Method for Guitar - all three. buy it on amazon, this is your guitar bible
  
• Chord Chemistry by Ted Greene
  
• The Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick - Seriously one of the best practice guides around. It is light on content, but explains how to practice and challenge yourself.
  
• A Real Book, for reading practice
  
• Tonal Harmony by Kostka
  
• Materials and Techniques of 20th Century Music, by Kostka
  
• The above books by Kostka will cover most of the theory content in the general undergraduate requirements for U.S. music programs
  
• Elementary Training for Musicians, Paul Hindemith - Very good book, particularly work on the sight reading material
  
• Progressive Sight Singing One of the most important skills for a well rounded musician
  
• Paul Gilbert's Terrifying Guitar Trip - Out of place with the above, but easily the best technical guide to guitar playing I have ever found. Even applicable if you don't want to play rock guitar.
  
  That was a fucking wall of text. Hopefully I didn't come off like a negative asshole or bore you to death. If you have any questions or complaints, let me know!

harmony is far more complex than any one post can explain to you. get a good book. i recommend Tonal Harmony. you can get it used for a good price. you will need to know some basics, like how to read music.

This is a wide array of questions for which you're going to get as many different answers as you get responses. Here's one set, though, I suppose.

I will preface everything by saying that, yes, time, practice, and listening to others are the three main things that will make you better. But it helps to listen to the right things and practice things the right way. I've played for about 21 years now (seriously for the last 10) and, as with any field, you never really close the gap between things you know and things you don't know: you just watch it widen and resign yourself to the fact that you can only improve in so many things at one time.

1. It's hard to recommend anything other than the standard music theory textbook Tonal Harmony (6th Ed., 5th Ed.). I used the fifth edition, and I can't imagine theory has changed too much in the last ten years, so you probably can't justify dropping over $100 on the sixth edition.
   
   
2. If you weren't gifted with perfect pitch, do interval ear training (there are probably better resources out there, but that was the first thing Google came up with). Recognizing intervals is the most important part of being able to play by ear.
   
   
3. I doubt everyone will agree with me, but I'd say to focus on one or two at once. That way you don't get overwhelmed by having to deal with seven different styles at the same time, and you can build strong foundations in just a couple of them.
   
   
4. What do you mean by "How do I get out of the 4/4 mentality?" Do you mean performing or composing? If performing, there's no trick it, honestly; you literally just count to a different number each bar. If composing, well...yeah, practice, I guess. Try to write some simple things in 3/4 or 5/4 or 6/8 or 7/8 or something. Think about how to expand or contract a melodic line so that it fits into a certain meter.
   
   
5. I use an M-Audio Oxygen 88 for composing/recording. It's definitely not the same as a real piano, but it's pretty solid. Don't pay the price on their site: I got mine for substantially less on Amazon and would wager that you can find a good deal, too. I'll warn you that it's a MIDI controller and not a digital piano/synthesizer, meaning that it doesn't have speakers and can't make sounds on its own: it has to go through software. If you want a digital piano, this link in the sidebar may help.
   
   
6. I use REAPER. It's wildly inexpensive, and if that's too expensive, the free trial is full-featured and lasts forever. It's got a pretty steep learning curve, but it's an extremely powerful piece of software.
   
   
7. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Medtner, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Kapustin (evidently anyone named Sergei or Nikolai =P), and, more recently, Avishai Cohen (the bassist) and Hiromi Uehara. I'll likely forever acknowledge Beethoven as the greatest composer ever to live, however.
   
   
8. Yes. Write them down. If nothing else, write down at least the chord progressions and the melody and the bits that never seem to change. For improvised parts, I don't know if there's a standard notation: if I'm writing by hand, I just draw squiggly lines that follow the general shape of what I usually improvise.
   
   
9. I'm incredibly new to improvisation, being classically trained and just now finding myself very interested in jazz, but I'd say: know the style, know your theory, and listen, listen, listen. He talks about jazz in particular, but Mulgrew Miller has a series of several YouTube videos in which he discusses improvisation, and I'd wager much of it can be applied across many genres: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyRGB_x7VSg#.

I don’t know if this will help with edm. But a decent textbook for theory is the Kostka.
https://www.amazon.com/Tonal-Harmony-Introduction-Twentieth-Century-Music/dp/0072852607
That’s what I used in college

Lypur on youtube has great videos.

This is a good book.

I don't think you've learned incorrectly, just differently and in perhaps a really good way. From the way you described your sight reading, you see the notes on the page and play them, but do not translate them into letter names in your head. That's kinda awesome - like learning French through immersion and just knowing the french word for something, instead of having to translate it in your head from English to French.

In terms of sight reading, you could try a few things:

1. Work on your theory. Analyze your sheet music. What are the chords you're playing? What's the structure of the piece? Maybe you're playing a piece that has an ABA form, maybe the A section has a chord structure of something simple like I-iv-V-I. Once you have that pattern in your head, it gets harder to slip up.
   
   This book is standard for teaching music theory in college. Tonal Harmony by Kostka
   
   
   
2. Use "starting points." Pick out several logical places to just start a piece. Could be a section, a part of a section. For a Chopin nocturne, you might have starting points every 16 or so bars. For a Bach 4 part fugue, it might be every 4 bars. The point is, if you get lost, you can always jump ahead to a starting point. Try to play from the point "cold."
   
   
3. Don't take your ear for granted. Listen to the piece, hum the piece - the theme and then the bass - while you play. This will get the song in you head so you know where you're going. It can also make your line more musical because you will intuitively play more like a singer sings.
   
   
4. Practice smaller sections. This goes back to number 1. Do not try to memorize the whole piece at once. Memorize 8 bars. Memorize 16 bars. Start at the next point. Can you play that 8 bars cold?
   
   
5. Play the penny game. This game is sadistic, but it works. Take five pennies, put them on the left side of your music stand.
   
   

• Play a part - a few bars, whatever.
  
• Did you play it "right"? The way you wanted it? Right dynamics, articulation, memorized, whatever you're going for this time around. If so, move a penny to the right.
  
• Do it again. Made a mistake? Put the penny back to the left.
  
• Keep doing this till all the pennies are to the right.
  
  This game makes it to where you're playing the part right, the way you want it more than you flub the part.
  
  Hope this helps and good luck to you.
  
  edit: Formatting - fml.

The Complete Idiot's Guide is a surprisingly good resource. I taught myself from this book in 6th grade and ended up with a strong command of theory before high school.

Once you get what you can from that, try
Kostka and Payne. From my understanding this is a very popular book for college theory classes. It also has a workbook that can be useful.

If you spend 20 minutes a day studying theory, you will have a solid foundation in no time.

For any particular style? It sounds like you're more interested in classical -- the text for my first two years of music theory in college was this one but if you're at all interested in jazz theory I can't recommend this one enough.

Ok lessons would def help but if u take your time a book like Tonal harmony is a college textbook but all the basics are in it and I think like some maths books some answers are in the back plus since I believe there are many editions u can get them used for cheap. Just go slow and pay attention tonal harmony

This is what we used for first and second year music school.

https://www.amazon.com/Tonal-Harmony-Introduction-Twentieth-Century-Music/dp/0072852607/ref=la_B000AQ01DK_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485840371&sr=1-6