How many chords must someone know to be considered an actual musician?

'Cuz I said 'musicians', not 'social phobics who have just graduated from XBOX and now need a new excuse for living at home at age 31 and staying in their room masturbating while claiming to be doing something 'creative'', altho those ppl can make good records too'

*sigh*

YES, BUT THE DRUMMERS, DAVE! WHAT ABOUT DRUMMERS? and other percussionists?

or are you going to say something dumbass, luddite, and completely ill-informed about them too? Like, 'they just hit things with sticks, don't they?'

But being able to operate an irony-recognition pedal will help in these music-related chat boards.

Even if we're talking about instruments where you can play western chords (so not drums, monophonic instruments, sitars etc) like guitar and piano then the way you've said it means the person would have to not just 'know' chords but also know what they're called. That doesn't matter, it just matters what they sound like and what they sound like in relation to other chords.

For 90% of music you can probably just get away with knowing major and minor, for punk or heavy metal just power chords would do.

Loads of guitarists probably just think "if i put my fingers like this, i get a sound like that"

The way the question is phrased makes it seem like you aspire to (or think it's good to aspire to) some formal knowledge. That can make it a lot easier, but it's not needed. Sometimes you need to know the rules so you can break them. I know everyone says that but it's true.

Ah...*those* drummers. They're a bit like those guitarists to whom it would be nice to say : "change to 7/8 after the second verse" and they say "But I only know how to strum in 4/4 and besides I am the guitarist and therefore Way More Important". And so on.

btw I don't play drums. I just have utmost respect for good drummers, most of whom 'know' when a chord changes even if they can't name it in 3 seconds.

(But if you're asking how many guitar chords I know... erm... about 48 or so real ones, plus a few I made up. But then again, *I* was in Guitar Magazine, so there!)

But really, it's nice to know how to name the chords you're playing, esp. if you have to work with other musicians. Exception: Jad Fair.

No it isn't.

Q: How many lead singers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Just one - but all he has to do is stand still and the world revolves around him.

OK back to it: I believe Dan Perry was schooling y'all -

What do you mean no it isn't? OF COURSE it is.

Unless you have perfect pitch. I don't, do you?

the fact is that it can depend on the music no? if you choose to make music with an instrument you need to know a few chords but if you're putting recorded sound from different locations together then you prob would need diff types of skills.

would you consider the resulting piece to be music? are the ppl that make it musicians? I'd prob say yes.

However, the same analytical process is used to identify a chord, regardless of whether you're listening to it or you're looking at it.

A: Three. One to hold the lightbulb and two to drink until the WORLD spins...

I suspect that puts you in an elite category round these parts. I guess it's pretty easy to say that a certain chord sounds minor or major, but beyond that my guess is that most of us can't even tell an e chord from an f just by hearing it, let alone a g sharp from an h flat.

And anyway, Di is absolutely OTM.

You CAN learn it, though, contrary to popular belief. It just takes a while. Whether or not its necessary or not, that's been a long-standing debate. Probably not in rock, although it would be much easier for you. As for classical, there are some snobs who think that you can't be great w/o it (though I disagree).

Well I never claimed to be consistent!

I was a bit confusing though, basically I think:

You don't need to know theory

sometimes knowing it is good

sometimes knowing it is bad

It's more important how things sound than what they're called.

"dude, hold on...what you just played, that was cool. What *was* that?"

"uh...I dunno. Let me try and do it again." (Takes another sip of beer and squints at neck of guitar.)

What Dan is talking about is known is "relative pitch", and in my experience is a lot more useful than perfect pitch -- difference being that even if three of us are playing tune with each other, making wonderfully sonorous music, the guy with perfect pitch will be shifting in his seat because he can't hear the perfect root. Which, in practical terms, doesn't matter in the slightest.

Well this cleared things up a bit; I was thinking perfect pitch. Of course, I'd have to do some tinkering around on the piano before getting relative pitch absolutely right.

Honestly, I can't think of a single reason why knowing music theory would be bad. It makes performing/writing music easier, plus in Paula's example it allows you to communicate what you're doing to other musicians in a fairly efficient manner.

One of the dimensions along which this discussion is splitting is the dual function of any kind of language as a means of notating ideas & as a framework you use for having ideas – the ‘anti-theory’ idea embodies a suspicion that language doesn’t just express thought, it *guides* it – I don’t think this is an unreasonable suspicion, given our conscious experience (well, mine anyway) that we don’t just choose *what* to think, then search through a database of words to try to grid/map our thoughts/feelings onto our available word-notation – the process is so automatic/parallel that it just feels like thinking in words.
A suspicion of music theory can arise from different angles relating to this:
- as an even clumsier manifestation of this process, whereby because the descriptive system is coarser-grained, the results of absorbing it as the framework within which you think your musical thoughts means you only get lumpier/blander music concepts in your head – this suspicion gets ‘confirming’ examples every day when most of what you hear sounds so normal.
- because fence-and-tadpole music notation is a much coarser/sparser system for describing its material than the written word is for describing, er, everything, then it can be seen as a more restrictive descriptive/communicative framework imposed upon a more variable world of possible sound. (I bow to Dan’s superior knowledge at this point, but the impression I have from investigating classical music is that scores have left out so much of what makes it sound a particular way that the vastly different ‘interpretations’ of a particular piece arise from that.
- syntactical ‘rules’ do exist in languages – maybe there is a suspicion that they must do so in music language too: ‘you can’t play that there, it doesn’t make sense’ – ppl *will* say this kind of thing!
- the overlap in practice of music-theorists moving from a descriptive to a prescriptive role: this just does happen – you end up with a form of ROCKISM (yay!). The suspicion is that because this process is about ‘knowledge’ being used as an ego weapon, it just can’t apply to an ‘anything goes’ mentality which is about rejecting that: far from being seen as a glorification of ignorance, this mentality is about cheerful rejection of the snobbery arising from this quantitative => qualitative transformations.
( I don’t think it’s about, as Nabisco put it, ‘the more you know the less you know’ – it’s about ‘the more you know, the less you have your own opinions’ – a notion that is daft but also has something to it, I think, because:
(a) in practice v.few ppl get beyond knowledge as the filling of a bucket and into knowledge as the lighting of a fire
(b) it depends on what it is you ‘know’: sometimes you hear art/architecture/philosophy ppl who seem, for want of a better phrase, to have been educated out of their senses & critical faculties – knowledge acting as compromiser/confuser instead of clarifier (again, this is to do with your personal/social relationship to all these processes and whether you believe in ‘hierarchies’ of knowledge types)

(mark s – wasn’t there some famous self-taught Indian mathematical prodigy, who, it was acknowledged, came up with some bizarre maths ideas/theorems/proofs that he almost certainly would not have created had he received a full maths education first? I know it’s a compromised example because (a) he was a genius and not a thrashing typewriter monkey
(b) the extent to which his ideas were communicable depended on use of/translation into the standard math-notation of the Oxbridge squad in the end anyway
but this kind of thing is maybe part of what the ‘anti-theory’ mentality is imagining....)

And- isn't there also a dimension in here related to the extent of 'abstraction' within the activity/language being discussed, and its *function* within the culture? For communication - either between ppl wanting to exercise the craft of it, or between the makers -> listeners in terms of the establishment of a system of rules-of-thumb for metaphor/representation/description (eg if you want to make ppl feel like this then these keys/chords/whatever will generally get you in that area within our present culture) then theory must be a key to let you into those areas. But not all music-making or listening is about these processes – some of it seems more like abstract painting or maths or a kind of ‘sublimation’, with a function which isn’t that literal or prosaic or social ?

Me – I wish I had had Dan & Phil as music teachers! Maybe then I wouldn’t have found ‘music classes’ at school to be as arid and as boring, and as irrelevant as they seemed to be to anything about sound/music that I was actually interested in and affected by.....

but w/o his oxbridge sponsor (whose name i've entirely forgotten), it would all have been totally lost: you totally need both sides, overall, but no one person needs to be front-rank at both sides at the the same time (music's a social and collective activity anyway, and i don't just mean bands, so you can always divide up the labour...)

The name 'G.E Moore' keeps popping up in my mind....?

The portions of music theory that I see as hard and fast "rules" have to do with stricly quantifiable things; naming chords and describing rhythms, tempos and general dynamics. All of the voice-leading and harmonization "rules" are really suggestions or guidelines and are very dependent upon what you want the end result to sound like. If you don't know what you want the end result to sound like, by all means experiment and play around until you like what you hear. When you come up with something you like, though, I stand by my original claim that even a rudimentary grounding in theory can help you capture it so that you can do it again. That's the core of my argument, which I think has been distracted by me going after phantom "I hate learning" red flags.

So back to the original question, paraphrased:
How much music theory do you need to know to be considered a musician? .. assuming someone ELSE can describe it for you.

ie microtonalism is prescribed against by being hard to notate (next to impossible on standard staves, and w/o workable consensus on replacement notations...)

"if it can't be notated it doesn't exist" isn't remotely a justifiable position, but it's often hard to argue AGAINST a position where you can't isolate and point to the thing yr trying to discuss in a shared language (you end up yelling DO YOU SEE?, or rather, DON'T YOU HEAR!)

(non-replicability is a good explanation for the weakness of pil's post-flowers output, but it's not an argument against the strength of the stuff they discovered on metal box, which i don't think better trained musicians had a prayer of discovering AT THAT TIME) (now, of course, "noise" is a huge terrain)

How do you explain my love for the generic album and _Happy?_, Mark? Lydon still hasn't learned how to sing.

"if it can't be notated it doesn't exist" isn't remotely a justifiable position, but it's often hard to argue AGAINST a position where you can't isolate and point to the thing yr trying to discuss in a shared language (you end up yelling DO YOU SEE?, or rather, DON'T YOU HEAR!)

Gigantic strawman: NONE of the pro-theory people have said "If it can't be notated, it doesn't exist." We've all said "Anything can be notated." Music theory is a meta-language that describes the algorithms people come up with to create music, no cast-iron rules for creating music.

(and yr love for _happy_ passeth human understanding, you big mentalist)

(my argument is really only that notation and theory and knowledge exist in history also, that they're not special upstairs rooms you can run to to escape the tides and currents of lived life, and then when you choose a theory to deepen yr understanding, you may [initially] be cutting yrself off from exactly the thing you want to understand, because theories — which is to say, generalisations — work by weighting the value of some aspects over others... if the thing you want to look at is operating right at the crux-point where the long-ago choice is an issue, then the theory you use to illuminate may murkify)

(the point is easier to illustrate via science) (plate tectonics for example)

I think that "initially" is doing a huge amount of work in that last post, Mark. If you learn theory and then come up with unimaginative stuff, I think the fault lies in your imagination, not in theory itself.

I like Ned's analogy of music theory as a foreign language, because oftentimes when learning a new language people are often terrified of bending the vocabulary to create idioms that more accurately express what they want to say. The more comfortable you get with a language, the more likely you are to start playing with its syntactic rules and the usual meanings of its words to get your point across AND be successful in having other speakers of that language understand you. (The big assumption here is that music is a medium of communication.)

I'm not sure that music theory can be that easily compared to scientific theory, if only because music theory aims almost exclusively at descriptive analysis in order to make repetion possible, and not at looking at origins to find objective truth (like plate tectonics).

Music theory is very much like the theory of language (and scribes of both often get caught up in lengthy syntax/grammar debates when in fact it's interpretation that is the crux) -- also remembering that communication is as often a product of what isn't said (what's the musical equivalent of blushing? I doubt it would be notated, but if it were, I wouldn't expect anyone to feel obligated to observe it).

in practice v.few ppl get beyond knowledge as the filling of a bucket and into knowledge as the lighting of a fire: this is totally true -- on some level I think I have a weird faith that the people who take knowledge as "bucket-filling" probably aren't going to be good at trying things with an empty bucket, either.

That's exactly how I feel, too.

So in light of this, I think it shows laziness and
lack of musicianship to only know three chords.
Talk about limiting yourself.

"He's playing Chuck Berry riffs! Badly! Wire sounds like
ELP compared to these guys."

Which makes Clash - Yes and the Replacements - Genesis.
I'm interested in music, not attitude. If I want attitude
I'll listen to my thirteen-year-old neighbor.

I'd say-
guitar: A-form & E-form barre chords, major & minor
Bass: none
drums: none
keyboards: all major & minor, though a lot of new wave type dudes get by with just right hand melody lines

:hides under bed and cries:

According to Bono: red guitar + three chords + the truth

haha. i'm no u2 fan, but is this right?!?

no the guitar has to be black

should be "red guitar + three chords = the truth," anyways.

Bono sang "All I got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth" in U2's cover of All Along The Watchtower. The line is based on a quote from Harlan Howard describing the perfect country song as "three chords and the truth."

U2 are not country though, so they might want to sometimes try some other chords. Like some minor ones for instance...

Not that they don't.....