For a worship guitarist, knowing chord shapes, a few strumming patterns and some simple techniques like right hand damping is usually sufficient to play in a worship session—that and lots of hours of practise of course!
However, good musicians are rarely satisfied with what they already have—they are more excited about augmenting their skills with new ones.
Music theory is valuable if you want to deeply understand and appreciate music. It can also help you explore music more creatively.
While you can always enroll for music theory classes offline, these 4 resources can help if online learning is your thing.
4 Free Online Resources to Learn Music Theory
MusicTheory.Net
Concepts that you can learn include Staff, Clefs, Ledger lines, Time signatures, meter, Scales, intervals, chords, chord progressions and more! All lessons are free to access on a browser. There are also mobile apps for iOS users, which can be purchased to support this resource.
Lessons are quick and cover only the essentials. So, if you don’t have a lot of time to spare, this is quite a useful resource.
Yale Music Theory Course
This is a collection of 22 YouTube videos that teach a wide variety of music theory concepts right from learning to listen to music to understanding various musical genres.
Each video is around 60 minutes taught by Prof. Craig Wright from Yale University.
If you have the time, this is an outstanding resource—there are videos on introduction to musical instruments, different genres (including Gregorian), melody, bass patterns, studies of Mozart, Beethoven and others.
If you’re serious about studying music theory, you should check it out!
Music Fundamentals 101
This is another valuable YouTube resource—a collection of more than 20 videos of classes taught by Pebber Brown, a highly trained and qualified guitarist.
Lots of good stuff here and it’s all free!
Learning Music With Ray
This is a worship focused collection of YouTube videos covering concepts like improvisation, time signatures, key, pitch, harmony etc.
Videos also cover basics of various musical instruments like keyboard, clarinet, trumpet, percussion and more.
