How Long Does It Take to Learn Music Theory? A Comprehensive Guide

When most people think of music theory, they imagine something dry and boring: struggling to read the black dots on paper, learning how to draw a treble clef, and wondering what a Neapolitan Sixth is and what on earth you’re meant to do with it. Eventually, most people give up because it’s more fun to grab your instrument and make some noise. After all, that’s why you started learning music anyway. The real problem isn’t the music theory itself, but rather that most people are forced to learn the wrong kind of music theory.

Mastering a musical instrument entails more than just learning how to play it. Knowledge of theory will help you understand sound more deeply. For anyone wanting to pursue a career in music, mastering music theory is vital, playing an important role that is often overlooked. It allows you to "read" notes without having to play them on a musical instrument. Notes in music are analogous to letters in writing. It will take a long time to learn to "speak" with their assistance.

What is Music Theory?

Music theory is a set of educational and scientific disciplines within musicology that deal with the theoretical aspects of music. All of this serves as the foundation for creating music. It typically includes:

Instrumentation (the study of musical instruments)
Orchestration (the presentation of music for orchestra)
Harmony (the study of how music is organized)
Polyphony (the study of polyphonic compositions)
Eurhythmics (the study of the meter and rhythm)
Musical form (learning about the structure of a piece of music)

Why is Music Theory Important?

Music theory is a language for discussing or analysing music, so that we can teach it and talk about it. It's not a "bunch of rules" at all; it is just a description of what happens in real-life music.

For the last two years, I’ve tutored an introductory theory paper at the University of Otago. This is a paper students take when they want to do a music degree but haven’t had enough music theory training to cope with the requirements of the first-year theory papers. Right at the beginning of the semester, I remember noticing that the students were pretty disinterested, and most of them still didn’t understand why doing music theory was actually going to help them in their career as a musician. I decided to spend an entire lesson simply putting everything in context. I explained how having a thorough knowledge of keys, chords and intervals not only helps you understand music and learn songs faster, but it also allows you to transpose a song instantly in your head. It allows you to create altered chords that sound awesome by playing an entirely different chord to what the rest of the band is playing. It allows you to write better music, and analyse the key of a song instantly because you look at a seemingly random collection of notes and can see how they relate to each other. When you can do this, you find that you have so much more musical freedom, both in your playing and your songwriting. It allows you to understand what you hear and gives you a vocabulary for explaining it. This is applicable music theory. This is essential knowledge for any musician. Once I’d finished putting everything in context, the class was pretty eager to start learning some music theory.

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Applicable music theory includes memorizing all key signatures, understanding how chords are constructed and where they fit in a key, and being able to instantly name any interval from any root note.

How Long Does It Realistically Take?

If you want to master music theory, plan on spending about four years learning and applying it:

Six to twelve months for the basics (for example, the pitch of the tone, scales, keys, consonance, and dissonance).
Three to four years for advanced concepts.

Music theory is a truly vast subject, and it’s possible to spend your entire lifetime studying it without ever reaching the end!

Factors Influencing Learning Time

Several factors can influence how long it takes an individual to learn music theory:

Prior Experience: Do you play any musical instruments? How many years have you been playing? Can you read the notes? Your prior experience will influence how much you need to learn, where you need to get your education, and how informative this training should be.

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Learning Speed and Interest: It also depends on how fast of a learner you are, how interested you are in learning, and how much time you discipline yourself to dedicate to just theory. Very similar to learning to speak a new language. At first it seems like you're learning a bunch of rules and idioms that aren't going anywhere. But after some time, one day, you'll have that "A HA" moment!
Age: Age does make a difference, but the picture is complicated. Children tend to pick up new information more quickly than adults, but when the information is complex age is on your side. For the early grades (1-5), young children (from age 9-ish upwards) will probably learn fairly quickly, but the higher grades (6-8) may well prove too advanced for a student who is younger than around 14. This is because the higher grades are very analytical, and analytical learning needs a more mature brain than fact-learning. All adults know that the brain declines in power as they get older, but there is no upper age-limit for learning new things. If you listen to a teacher, read books, watch videos or demonstrations and complete exercises, you will certainly learn. If you question your teacher, make notes from booksand videos, and act on feedback exercises, your progress will be very much better. Whether you have a teacher or not, your studying can be active.
Learning Method: If you have 1-1 tuition, you will probably make fast progress, whereas if you are learning in a group, the larger the group, the less effective it is likely to be.
Dedication and Consistency: Because music is a language, you have to use it consistently to develop fluency. Practice this exercise to develop essential music theory. It took me 10 years of learning and doing music before I’d been in enough different musical situations that the theory I was using came second nature to me. When I was tutoring the class at uni, I wanted a way to fast track this process. Aim to complete this exercise four or five times a week. It’s the consistency that will make the difference.

ABRSM Grades and Time Investment

The UK exam boards (as well as AMEB in Australia, RCM in Canada, and AP in the USA, to name a few others) focus on a small sub-section of music theory, which is mostly based on Western art (“classical”) music. (Trinity exam board in the UK does branch off a little more). They mostly do not cover topics such as jazz, non-Western music, orchestration, acoustics and so on. Exams of all kinds are given a TQT rating by the accrediting examining board. The ABRSM publishes its TQTs for the eight music theory exam grades. This figure can give you a broad idea of how it will take to study for an exam, but in reality this is simply an average and many learners will need considerably less, or more time.

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Grades 1-5 ABRSM basically require you to learn musical facts, and then give those facts as answers. In grades 6-8 ABRSM, 50% of the exam is skills-based, and your answers will be creative. You will need to write music - harmony, or melody, or both.

Let’s take grade 6 as an example. The TQT is 130 hours. If you study 20 minutes per day, every day, then grade 6 will take 390 days, or just over a year, However, you are likely to find it less complicated as you go along, so your maximum daily study time might increase as time goes by.

Bearing in mind all the points above, (and the obvious fact that some people are quick learners and others are less so), in my experience the average time it takes most people to pass ABRSM grades 1-5 music theory is around 3 months per grade. Grade 1 often takes a bit longer than grades 2-4, because the student is more familiar with theory papers by the later stages, and there is not a huge jump between the grades. Grade 6 can be done by a hard-working high-achiever in 3 months. Grade 7 is often glossed over. Many people elect to skip the actual exam, and just work through study materials.

How to Learn Music Theory Effectively

Consider Your Knowledge Level: Your prior experience will influence how much you need to learn, where you need to get your education, and how informative this training should be.
Find the Right Resources: Examine what free and paid courses have to offer. You can make a short list of aspects of music theory that you need to master. They are usually highlighted in the course programs.
Utilize Online Resources:
- musictheory.net: It is a good free option for people who have little or no knowledge of music theory. It covers a wide range of topics, from note durations and time signatures to Neapolitan chords. The platform provides lessons with animation, a clean presentation style, and an intuitive design.
- Coursera.org: This option provides Fundamentals of Music Theory training through a structured curriculum, practice tests, and final exams. The course is taught by doctorate-level lecturers with degrees from reputable music colleges.
- Soundbrenner Learn: The resource is a video series for musicians who want to master rhythm. It includes videos and articles delivered by rhythm instructors from different music environments. This solution includes exercises and rhythmic warm-ups in addition to theory to help you put theory into practice.
- Influencers (Adam Neely): Adam Neely is a YouTube who offers a new perspective on music theory.
- Music Theory Academy: Also, it offers many music theory tests and exercises to help you reflect on what you have learned. This resource will also be beneficial to advanced students because it covers complex concepts.
- Music Matters: This course is intended to help modern students advance their musical knowledge. It is taught by Gareth Green, an expert teacher. He explains the material in a non-obtrusive way, provides examples, and plays the keyboard, allowing his students to hear the "speech" of the previously written notes.
- MyMusicTheory.com: includes a complete set of video courses, from beginner to advanced level, ABRSM and Trinity, which will teach you in a logical order and which provide demos, audio examples and walkthroughs of every topic.
Learn in Small Steps: After each block, most modern platforms ask students to take an online test to determine how well they learned the material. The main thing is to not rush and hone your knowledge through practice. You can take lessons again if necessary because not everything in music is always understood the first time.
Active Studying: Whether you have exercises marked by a teacher, or whether you are checking them yourself from an answer key, the important point is that you need to act on the results. Make a list of your mistakes and try to discover patterns. Ask yourself why you made a mistake - was it a slip in concentration, or is there something you need to read up on? Do you tend to make the same sort of errors? Use strategies like flash cards, mnemonics, word associations etc.
Explain to Others: One of the best ways to learn something is to try to explain it to someone else - even if they don’t know much about the subject matter, the very process of you explaining will stimulate your own mind and expose areas that you only vaguely understand (you can’t explain something you don’t really understand!).

Key Elements of Applicable Music Theory

There are three essential elements of what I consider applicable music theory, and they are all related.

1. Memorize all key signatures

We build a major scale by taking the tone/semitone structure of a major scale (TTSTTTS) and playing if from a root note. The particular combination of accidentals (sharps or flats) we get when we play this structure from a particular root note is what is called a key signature. The circle of fifths starts at the top with C major and moves around the interval of a fifth each step clockwise, hence its name. A step clockwise around the circle from C adds a sharp, and a step anti-clockwise around the circle from C adds a flat. We add sharps and flats in a particular order.

Memorizing the order of sharps and flats means you only need to remember the number of sharps or flats are in each key. This saves you having to try to remember a sequence of eight different notes every time you want to learn a new scale! The order for adding flats is the same as the order for adding sharps, only in reverse.

Create a sentence using the letters to help you remember the order. A common one is:

Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle (for the order of sharps)
Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles’ Father (for the flats).

Once you have memorised the order of sharps and flats, you need to learn the number of sharps or flats in each key. You want to learn these randomly, not in a sequence. Aim to look over the chart for 30 seconds a day, and start by naming two or three keys and saying how many sharps or flats they have:

C, no sharps.
D, two sharps.
G, one sharp.

The next day, add another key and repeat the process. Remember, there’s no rush. The goal is that you know them well, so the key is consistency. If you do this for 30 seconds every day, adding a new key each time, it should take you two weeks to memorize them all. But do it at your own pace. If it takes you a month, that’s no problem.

Another helpful tool I’ve found in learning the number of sharps in a key signature is to look at the number of lines it takes to draw the letter of the key. I pretend you use five lines to draw a B. For the key of F#, I pretend the sharp symbol is a small x2, so it takes three lines to draw it x2 (six lines for six sharps).

2. Understand how chords are constructed and where they fit in a key

A standard triad or seventh chord is created by stacking thirds from a root note. The particular quality of each of these stacked thirds defines whether the chord has a major, minor or dominant tonality.

We can stack thirds by counting through the C major scale to form a C major chord:

C D E F G A B C

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

We end up using the 1st, 3rd and 5th scale degrees of the C major scale, so we can say that a major chord has the formula 1 3 5.

The formulas for all the other chords you will come across in this exercise are written below:

Major 1 3 5
Minor 1 b3 5
Diminished 1 b3 b5
Major 7 1 3 5 7
Minor 7 1 b3 5 b7
Dominant 7 1 3 5 b7
Minor 7b5 1 b3 b5 b7

These formulas all relate back to the major scale of the root note of the chord. See this example using an A minor chord, which has the notes A C E. Each scale degree of the major scale has a particular chord quality associated with it.

3. Be able to instantly name any interval from any root note

Every scale must have one of each letter of the musical alphabet represented somehow (A B C D E F G). These letters can be either be sharp, flat, or natural (A#, Ab, or A), as determined by the key signature of the scale.

If you know the key signatures for each scale off by heart, you don’t have to try to memorize if a fifth away from B is an F or an F#. You just know that the distance from any kind of B to any kind of F is some kind of fifth. Then you use your knowledge of key signatures to realise that the key of B has an F#, therefore the distance of a fifth from B is F#.

Please note: The point of this exercise is not to try and learn every quality of interval. For example, the interval from B to F# is known as a ‘perfect fifth’, while the interval of B to F is known as a ‘diminished fifth’. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry about it at this stage. The aim is to get you so familiar with your intervals that, if you are asked, ‘What is a fifth above B?’, you would immediately know it was some kind of F.

The Importance of Practical Application

After you complete some pieces of training, use your life experience to your advantage. It is a hands-on activity that will allow you to see how the theory works in practice. Choose a learning tool, improve your skills, start making music, or simply enjoy your musical knowledge and experience.

Overcoming Challenges and Misconceptions

One problem that many people find (or think they find) in learning music theory, is that it can come across as a bunch of dry rules which don’t appear to make sense in the real world. Another problem is that people don’t find it easy to hear what they see written down, just by looking at the notes.

Music theory is written down in words, because it’s a language for discussing or analysing music, so that we can teach it, and talk about it. Music theory is not a “bunch of rules” at all; it is just a description of what happens in real-life music.

When we begin to learn music theory, we usually start off with the simplest ideas (to avoid difficulty), and this means studying the music which was written roughly between the years 1700-1800 (e.g. by JS Bach). The rules we learn are describing the music of that time.

As music styles progressed, each style became more complicated to describe. This is because during 1700-1800 composers were more interested in creativity within the confines of accepted rules, whereas from c.1800 onwards, composers were more interested in creativity without the confines of rules. This did not happen overnight of course. It was a gradual transformation, until we reach the highly experimental music of the 20th and 21st centuries. This is why we begin with the simpler, more controlled Baroque/Classical era. It does not mean that all music must conform to those rules - far from it! And this is also why many of the “rules” we learn appear to be continually broken in the music we play.

Being able to “hear what you see” (or audiate) is a really useful skill. Most theory books take it for granted that you can hear music by looking at it, in the same way that most adults can read words without saying them out loud. But the reality is that most people are not good audiators. If you are at the stage where audiation is a challenge, you will probably find that learning music theory from a book is frustrating.

Is It Too Late to Start?

Absolutely not late at all. Not only is it never late, but you are extremely young. When you are 19 it is never late for something. You can start at any age. Basically, you can build an arsenal of tricks and rules; your first pieces might be very simple, but they will be pieces. They might not "follow all the rules" yet - if you want them to - but they can still sound remarkably good. Just dive in and start.

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