How I Actually Got Through Essentials Of Music Theory Complete
I picked up Essentials Of Music Theory Complete about four years ago when I was trying to clean up gaps in my own knowledge. I had been playing guitar for years, could read standard notation, but every time I sat down to analyze a chord progression outside of common pop patterns I would freeze. The course itself is a structured video curriculum with workbook PDFs, practice drills, and a lot of audio examples. It covers everything from interval identification all the way through modal harmony and reharmonization techniques. The module on secondary dominants and borrowed chords is where most people hit a wall. The course moves quickly past the basics and assumes you are comfortable doing mental transcription. I wasted about three days going back and forth on a section about diminished bar lines before realizing the problem was not the material. It was that I had not done the interval ear-training exercises in the supplementary deck. The workbook tells you to spend twenty minutes daily on that drill, and I was skipping it. Once I stopped skipping, the harder modules started making actual sense.
Where To Get Essentials Of Music Theory Complete
You can find the course on major digital education platforms. It is also sold directly through the creator's website. I bought mine from the official site because the bundle includes the full workbook and a downloadable Anki deck for interval and chord recognition. The individual video platform purchase is slightly cheaper but does not include the flashcards. If you are on a budget and only need the video content, the standalone option works fine. The current version I am referring to is the 2024 revision. Earlier editions had broken audio links in modules twelve through fourteen, so make sure you are getting the latest build. The publisher pushed an update that fixed spacing issues in the PDF answer key and improved the tempo range on the transcription exercises.
What The Course Actually Covers
The material is divided into roughly nine sections. It starts with staff notation review, moves into intervals and triads, then builds through seventh chords, voice leading, functional harmony, modulation, and finally advanced reharmonization. The pacing is deliberate. Each section has a quiz at the end that requires you to identify intervals by ear, write out chord progressions, and analyze short excerpts. The section on modal interchange deserves special mention. The course explains it the way most teachers do not: it frames borrowed chords as color substitutions tied to the mode of the major scale rather than introducing modes as a separate topic. That framing actually worked for me. I have seen many students struggle because they learn Dorian and Phrygian as isolated concepts without understanding how the same chords appear in major-key contexts. There is also a full module on counterpoint and species writing that most learners skip. It is useful if you want to understand why certain voice-leading rules exist. I found that doing just the first two species helped me write cleaner part-writing in my own compositions. The later species got unnecessarily dense, so I stopped there and used the material as reference instead.
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A Real Problem I Hit And How I Worked Around It
One specific issue I ran into involved the transcription exercise in module seven. The track asked you to harmonize a melody line that used pedal tones with chromatic passing chords underneath. The expected answer in the key was theoretically sound but practically useless for most real-world applications. I spent an hour trying to force it into standard roman numeral analysis and kept getting stuck because the bass note never moved while the upper harmony shifted through first inversions and applied dominants. The workaround was to analyze the passage in two layers. I wrote out the bass line separately, then stacked the upper voices on top, treating the stationary pedal as a harmonic anchor. Once I separated the two parts, the progression resolved into a clear pattern of descending chromatic inner voices over a holding note. The course does not teach this dual-layer approach explicitly, but it is the only way I could make sense of that exercise without going insane.
What The Course Gets Wrong Or Misses
For all its strengths, this curriculum has blind spots. The biggest one is that it barely touches on microtonality and alternative tuning systems. If you are working in jazz, contemporary classical, or any genre that uses just intonation or quarter tones, you will find the harmonic analysis framework too rigid. The course treats equal temperament as the default and does not address how tuning systems change chord perception. Another gap is rhythm. There is a brief section on polyrhythms and metric modulation, but it is underdeveloped compared to the harmony content. If you are primarily interested in rhythmic complexity, you should pair this with a dedicated text like Mark Levine's work on jazz rhythm or Godfrey Toussaint's papers on rhythmic patterns. The course gives you enough to get by but will not make you fluent. The ear-training component is also not as comprehensive as it should be. The built-in drills cover standard intervals and seventh chords in root position and common inversions, but they do not go into quartal harmony, altered dominants with extended tensions, or non-tertian voicings. I supplemented with a separate solfège program for that. The combination took my total study time from roughly eight weeks of part-time work to about twelve weeks, but the result was noticeably stronger.
Who This Course Is Actually For
It works best for musicians who already have basic reading skills and want to systematize their theoretical knowledge. If you are a complete beginner who has never looked at a staff, you will struggle with the pace. The course assumes you can follow chord symbols and recognize common time signatures without much prompting. It is also decent for producers and composers who want to move beyond loop-based writing. The reharmonization section alone is worth the price if you are tired of cycling through the same four-chord patterns. I used techniques from module eight to rebuild a track that felt stale, and the process cut my revision time in half. Instead of writing from scratch, I could take existing material and apply structural changes. If you are looking for a deep dive into music cognition or academic analysis, this is not the right resource. It is practical and performance-oriented. The exercises are designed to improve what you can do, not what you can write about in a paper.
Final Notes On Essentials Of Music Theory Complete
The course is solid. It is not perfect, and it will not solve every gap in your knowledge, but it gives you a clear structure to follow. I would recommend pairing it with active listening exercises and transcription work. The material stays with you much better when you are applying it to songs you actually like rather than just working through isolated examples. The workbook answers are available online, so you can check your work without waiting for a response from anyone. That alone saves a lot of friction during self-study.
