So You Want to Learn Music

The title says it all, people, “So you want to learn music”.

“But I don’t really want to learn music, Larsen!” you might be protesting, and to that I would say it would really behoove you to do so. Music (or dance, or any other sort of past time that involves rhythm) is truly something that I feel any masculine man should do. Why, you might ask?

Firstly, and most importantly, it nurtures your creative spark in a way that basically nothing in modern society will. I’ve always agreed with Brett at the Art of Manliness in that men need to create a lot more and consume a lot less, and my tastes run to music. Take it from me: it just feels good to create something totally unique, even if it’s not “professional quality”. And when you are building your masculine spirit, it’s always good to balance out the brutality of physical toil with some intellectual efforts.

And just think of what it does to your psychological health: telling somebody “I write music” or “I build furniture” is a lot less painful to your soul then telling them “I masturbate 5 times a day” or “I watch crappy animes where little girls shit on things”—to say nothing of how painful it would be for the woman in your life to tell her friends that her man is a fap-happy NEET.

Speaking of women, that leads to yet another reason you should get into playing music: women! Women adore a guy who can play music, and I’ve been told as such several times. Now as a musician myself I hate guys that only play crappy 3 chord bullshit to pick up chicks. I would never play some simplistic pop crap to drop panties to the floor…no, just kidding, I totally have. And yeah, it totally works.

*Ahem*

And thirdly, I have found that developing a sense of rhythm and musicality has directly helped me in terms of physical culture, in particular martial arts. I’m going to do an entire article on this topic, but in brief let me just say that to fight properly you’re going to need some sense of beat and rhythm— to truly apply the moves that I have taught you with precision and skill, you need to have a sense of rhythm, to keep yourself from flailing your limbs aimlessly and without control, having one of your limbs sticking out too long and presenting an opportunity to get counterattacked, or to count time and footsteps to do some of the more advanced attacks such as flying kicks.

Or perhaps there was some other reason why several orders of warrior elites, such as the knights of Europe and the samurai of Japan, had to, in addition to their martial training, do art, music, dancing, poetry, or any other activity that is not generally associated with breaking faces, depending on which warrior culture you are specifically looking at. But you already knew that.

If that’s not enough, Bruce Lee in his Tao of Jeet Kune Do also wrote about the need to develop rhythm in fighting, and he was a ballroom dance enthusiast when not practicing kung fu. So hopefully all of this will have convinced you to get into music. The question now is “how do I start?” As luck would have it, the way to start is identical no matter what instrument you pick (however, if you decided to learn how to sing, I can’t help you there). The first thing you have to do is learn how to read music to some basic level.

Each of these symbols refers to a specific tone that can be played on one instrument or another. This sample is based off of a piano, which is one of the most commonly played instruments due to its wide octave range. The musical staff goes from A to G, and then starts at A again an octave higher (octave=eight notes). V

Rhythm starts with whole notes (4 beats), and then subdivides to dotted half notes (3 beats), half notes (2 beats), quarter notes (one beat) and eigth notes (half a beat)—at least that’s how it is in the standard time signatures of Western music: 4/4 (4 beats per measure/quarter note gets the beat), 3/4, etc. There are many different types of time signatures, but the complicated should be avoided by absolute beginner and only tackled as skill improves.

Next, you have to learn how to play all of the available notes your instrument can play. Don’t be afraid to play off key or with an incorrect embouchere/fingering/etc, just get the noise out first.

Then, learn a few scales—scales being, in music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes arranged by their fundamental pitch, and most of the melody and harmony of any given song is built using the notes of one single scale. Whatever scale is chosen will affect, if not COMPLETELY ALTER, the song—do you want your song to sound happy or sad? There’s scales for that. Do you want your song to take on an “ethnic” sound, or sound like a type of musical genre? There are many scales for all of those! Simply put, if you’re not learning scales, you’re not going to be a good musician. There are close to 100 different types of scale, but the beginner obviously doesn’t need to learn those.

I’d recommend just learning the Ionian Major scale to start, as practicing this scale for all tonic notes will quickly learn you proper fingering and note placement. and mentally train you to remember the notes. It’ll also train you to read music. And besides, it’s the most basic scale of Western music.

Ionian scales are part of the bigger category of diatonic scales, scales that go from tonic to tonic and have five whole tones and two semi tones, defined by the interval pattern W-W-S-W-W-W-S, as shown above.

The easiest way to show this pattern is the C Major Scale above. As you can see, C-D is a whole step (meaning that in between C and D is another note that is skipped, C sharp), as is D-E. E-F is a half step (meaning there is no note in between E and F), F-G is a whole step. G-A is a whole step, A-B is a whole step, and B-C is a half step. Using this formula, you yourself can write any Ionian Major scale starting with any of the available tonic notes.

Or, you can just learn scales from this book of compositional scales written by…guess who?

Once you’ve practiced your scales, you can start developing a musical repertoire. And this is the easiest thing of all. Sheet music abounds on the internet for free, for all styles and regions. Just do a quick Google Search.

Even if you want to write music for some reasons that may or may not involve opening up the floodgates south of a woman’s equator, that’s not so hard: The first thing you’ll have to do is learn a few more scales (naturally). The key to writing music, or any creative talent, is to learn how to use the fundamental tools and then utilize them in your own creative vision (I am going to use music as the example because that is my particular interest). In the case of musical composition, those fundamentals are scales and modes and the other basics of musical theory (rhythm, time signature, etc.).

There’s no other way to do it then to sit down and experiment with it to create your own unique vision (this is of course the simplest of simplified explanations of musical theory, there are many published books and websites on the subject).

Still confused? I admit, it’s kind of difficult to teach music purely through text. In the future look out for a series of videos on music theory and practice. But for now, I hope this has persuaded you to at least give music a try—chances are you’ll be thankful you did.

And here’s that whole thing in video form!