The simple fact of the matter is that if you want to learn about music, it can be very difficult to find the right teacher. You may not want to complete a full degree and go to school, and it is very difficult to find tutors who can work around your time. Plus, depending on your geographical location, it may be difficult to find someone at all. Luckily, however, you can now find music theory classes online.
It is very important, however, that you choose the right online lessons. YouTube, for example, is filled with videos of people teaching you about music theory, but you cannot really trust what they say and take it as gospel. So how do you find something that is good? A simple Google search for “online music theory classes” on Google produces 3,410,000 results!
Finding Good Online Lessons
The first thing you have to do is know exactly what you want to learn. You may want to learn music theory, or a particular instrument, or a particular scale or chord, how to improvise, a particular style, and so on. It is actually recommended to start with music theory, because this ensures that you have a foundational understanding, regardless of what instrument you are interested in.
Music Theory Online
Some of the key things you will learn about if you study music theory, online or not, include:
- Note naming.
- Ear training.
- Simple rhythms.
Once you are a bit more advanced, you could learn about this such as:
- The pentatonic scale (think Claude Debussy).
- Modal scales.
- 12 tone scales.
- Syncopated rhythms.
- Chord quality.
- Compound time signatures.
- Chord transposition.
Online theory lessons allow you access to a vast array of different concepts. An added benefit is that you can study at a time, place, and pace that is convenient for you. Hence, if you have professional, educational, or social responsibilities, you can continue to meet them. It doesn’t matter whether you have specialists near you, or what their schedule is.
Of course, you do have to make sure that the lessons you receive are of high quality, so that you end up with transferable music skills. Key to this is looking at credentials. The best online music theory lessons are delivered through registered schools that have proper accreditation. Preferably, those are schools that, should you want to, you can actually attend. It is more and more common, for instance, for schools to offer MOOCs (mass open online courses), meaning that students can complete parts of the curriculum online and for free. Naturally, the hope is that the student is so impressed that they then enroll in the school fulltime, but that is not always the case. These types of courses are very interesting and will certainly benefit your knowledge of music theory. Most importantly, this guarantees that what you learn is of very high quality. Do also look into reviews that others who have complete the course have left.