Music Theory for Dummies - What's it really like?

"This book is written for all types of musician, from the absolute beginner, to the classical student who never learned how to improvise, to the seasoned musician who knows how to put music together but never bothered to find out how to read music beyond guitar tabs and lead sheets"

Now I don't know about you but I wan't really sure what a guitar tab and a lead sheet were. So I looked it up and I'll share it with you now:

A Guitar Tab is a form of musical notation that tells you where to place your fingers. Here's a picture of a guitar tab:

Part 5: The Part of Tens

The first thing to note about this book is that it has been written by Americans for America and other countries that use the whole note, half note system. This book does not cover the convention of British musicals names such as crotchet, quaver etc.

So let's look at the plus points in Music Theory for Dummies:

The Pros

1. The Cheat Sheet at the beginning is useful for people to carry around with them for some of the basic facts you need to know.

2. The appendix at the back has a comprehensive chord chart for both guitar and piano. With the piano chart shown with shaded keys for the notes you need to play. Neat!

3. There is quite a bit of history in this book, which is a nice background to the why's of certain musical oddities out there.

4. The remember section at the end of each concept is very useful in reminder you of the key points to remember for each concept.

5. I like their down to earth way of explaining each musical concept. It's definitely a breath of fresh air after many of the other "stuffily" written books. But it's shame the vocabulary is still too complex for most beginning students.

6. Using real tunes like the Rolling stones' "Satisfaction" helps the reader understand the concept much more easily. It's just a pity the songs aren't on the CD. But that would have made the book much more expensive.

7. The authors have made a real effort to make the learning of music theory fun.

8. If you're a guitarist it shows you where to put your fingers to play the notes.

9. There are rhymes for remembering the names of notes-cool!

10. A great explanation of why each instrument sounds different and how the different way they produce their sounds gives them their unique qualities.

11. Fantastic explanation of sound production as a whole and how we hear sounds.

12. Very extensive description of chords on both the piano and guitar

13. Good easy to read layout.

14. Good sequence of chapters one leading to the next.



The Cons

1. The book uses to many difficult words that kids would not understand.

2. Not enough drawings. Only one at the beginning of each chapter. The book really needs more drawings within the chapters.

3. In chapter 1 Rhythm, the CD could have been used to show how the note values change but instead they wrote CLAP, CLAP, CLAP ?

4. The CD really is a wasted opportunity as it is primarily only contains chords, scales and cadences (chord progressions).

Conclusions

As you can see from the list of Pros and Cons there is a lot to commend about Music Theory for Dummies.

So if you are looking for a fairly simple, easy to understand introduction to music theory then this is the book for you.

BUT I still can't recommend this book to an absolute beginner and kids just starting out, as it's still a little complex.

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