Quote:
Originally Posted by davetbass
Sorry, I was being a bit of a wise guy!, but I did want to make a serious point: lots of music is created and communicated with no more formal structure than that.
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1. Players feel a need to mock this subject of improving the currently horrible music theory, likely due to ego problems. By either making a joke, or trying to tear it down by discrediting the idea or messengers of the idea. You would do the topic a favor by explaining why you
feel the need to make it a joke.
2. The music system should definitely allow for incredibly easy communication (written or verbal) of the most prevalent music in the world:
pentatonic music (often called "folk music" and mostly derided by ivory tower academics)
Music elements of 1, 4, 5, should definitely be the most straightforward & rapid to notate in a good system. For any mode too.
Song forms (context here, is blues) which use 1, 4, 5, should also be straightforward to describe. Currently they are not. There is the standard 12-bar 1, 4, 5. It is so common and basic that it is boring, so players modify it. So there is also the quick-change, the turnaround, the double turnaround, and a whole bunch of other slight variations with nondescript names or regional names. Playing the wrong form would be completely incorrect. Players give up on attempting to communicate the form because the current music system does not provide a way to do so. They say, "meh, you'll hear it when it comes." That's b.s. Or sometimes they will communicate by naming a song which has the same form, which is fine if all players know that song, but that is not true when the players are not from the same school. "It's the Sugar groove, play Sugar, it's the Sugar" is about all a player has time to say on stage before beginning a jam, and if the bass player hasn't played Sugar before, they
will not be able to cop the desired groove (until maybe halfway thru the song, when the players correct each other to gel the sound). These are all examples of a system which is inefficient, incomplete, and broken.
I played with a bandleader/music teacher who used to call the middle-8, "the tween" (as in, "the in-between section"). He would call out, "It's the tween." What a dumb name. I didn't know what he was talking about at first, and then at a later jam I had again forgotten the meaning of his silly direction. Uneducated artists think it's cute to invent their own new names or create mythology around basic concepts. He had another cutsie name for triplets rather than calling them triplets. This obscures the real meaning. It violates basic academic or instructional or teamwork principle. aka: it's dumb. You cant have a group of people working on something and make up unique terms all the time, in a rapidly changing environment like a rehearsal or performance, and expect "it'll come together". Amateurism at its finest. A good system of theory is cohesive and makes sense. It's easy to learn, the grammar is structured, the ideas are concretely communicable. Then everybody uses it, because it gets the job done and done right. Players purposely mostly avoid using or even learning music theory today because it's awkward and horrible.
My assumption in the OP was that players familiar with DAW and technical recording concepts would easily have suggestions or recommendations for improvements in music theory notation. Because they run into it often and are likely more technically minded, and also likely have a forward-looking view. The stereotypical recording engineer in a session of misfits in a rock band faces this lack of comprehension in "teamwork" on a daily basis. It may be a bad assumption if the music education standard is already so low that they also don't even see the obvious flaws as a problem.