An Interactive Guide to Learning Music Basics

Who wants to be a rock star? Everyone of course. Well, these days you don't really need to understand music to be on MTV. However, if you want to learn music theory or brush up on one of the many subjects we've all forgotten since high school, I suggest checking out Ricci Adams' website, musictheory.net. It's free, easy to use, and an asset to learning music theory. Ricci Adams' provides an excellent tutorial website that both experienced and beginning musicians could benefit from.

The site is broken into lessons, trainers and utilities for learning basic music theory.

The lessons portion includes scales, the staff, notes, duration, intervals and a multitude of information on other subjects. The layout of the page provides for easy and simple ways to view content and go back and forth between lesson points. Ricci Adams provides excellent, interactive explanations and definitions to key aspects of learning music. You will find that it is quite easy to grasp these music theory concepts so you can proceed to the trainers portion. You could literally not understand any specific music theory elements and easily obtain this knowledge in a matter of minutes.

The trainers portion of musictheory.net includes practice in the above mentioned lessons subjects, but also provides excellent insight with a keyboard, guitar, and brass trainer. The sections of each include a picture, a highlighted note or component of music reading, and a selection of answers to choose from. You can pick what you think is best and then proceed to the next question. If you get it wrong, it shall tell you the correct answer, still teaching you. This particular part of the site is great because not only are you being told easy to remember points, facts, and definitions, you are getting to utilize your new insight to test your knowledge.

An even better aspect of the training portion are the ear trainers. The ear trainers are for scales, intervals, and chords. Each section actually plays music for you to hear, and you will choose the answer that corresponds to the sound. Not only are you gaining knowledge for recognizing elements of music, or playing, but also the most important component, which is hearing it.

The utilities portion includes a chord calculator, staff paper generator, and matrix generator. This part is handy because it enables you to pick notes and aspects of a music piece and then generates it so you may "look" at it.

Ricci Adams' musictheory.net also provides a translation section, with a variety of languages. You don't have to speak English to utilize his useful music theory teachings.

A particularly great thing about the website is it provides an offline download. So you can practice everything on the site without even having internet access.

All in all, I highly suggest checking out Ricci Adams' musictheory.net to expand your understanding of music theory.