Idiot’s Guides: Music Theory, 3rd Edition

New edition of the best-selling book about music theory — more than 250,000 copies sold!

Many people find music theory a tough subject– but it doesn’t have to be! The best-selling Idiot’s Guides: Music Theory, Third Edition, is a concise and clear guide that teaches any budding musician (and even more experienced ones) how to read musical notation by navigating the basics of reading and composing music. This book covers:

• The basics of tones, including pitches, clefs, scales, intervals, and major and minor keys.
• The building blocks of rhythm, including note values, basic notation, time signatures, and tempo, dynamics, and navigation.
• How tunes are created, starting with melodies, chords, chord progressions, and phrases and forms.
• The basics of accompaniment, including transcribing, accompanying melodies, and transposing to other keys.
• Composing and arranging, including coverage of musical genres and forms, how to compose your own music, arranging for voices and instruments, working with lead sheets and scores, and performing your music.
• Helpful reference appendixes, including a glossary, chord charts, and instrument ranges.
• Exercises at the end of each chapter, and an answer key appendix.
• All-new coverage of genres, composing, and arranging.
• Expanded online ear-training and transcribing exercise content.

Music theory is the study of music’s basic notes, chords, scales, and more, and how they combine into composed pieces of music. But studying theory can be like learning a new language. This helpful guide breaks down all the complicated concepts and teaches you music theory in easy-to-understand terms with lots of examples and over 100 practice exercises. In it, you get:

• A primer on pitches, scales, intervals, keys, and musical notation.
• Pointers on using time signatures, tempo, and dynamics to navigate a piece of music.
• Guidance on combining tones, rhythms, and chord progressions to create music.
• A study of harmonies, counterpoint, chord substitutions,  turnarounds, and more.
• Advice on composing your own music and arranging for voices and instruments

BONUS: Over 1 hour of listen-and-learn ear training audio instruction available online!

CLICK HERE FOR ONLINE CONTENT

NOTE: If you’re having trouble accessing the online content, follow these steps. Some readers have reported issues accessing this content with the Internet Explorer web browser; you may want to switch to Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge for better results. 

1. Go to https://www.dk.com/us/idiotsguidesdownloads/
2. Click the cover for this book.
3. Click the DOWNLOAD AUDIO TRACKS link.
4. When prompted by the SAVE AS dialog box, choose a location for the file.
5. Once the file is downloaded, unzip it. (If you’re using Windows, right-click the file and select EXTRACT ALL; if you don’t have this opinion, use an unzip program such as WinZip to extract the files.)
6. Double-click to open the extracted file.
7. There should be two folders inside. Double-click the THEORYaudio folder.
8. You now see individual files for each ear-training exercise. Double-click an exercise file to open it.

• Saved in: Music
• Tagged: Book, Idiot's Guides, music, music theory