Chapotony Chatano here, internet's busiest hogposter, and it's time for another edition of "Let's Argue", where we're on the internet, we accept your hot takes, unpopular opinions, and tough questions, and we struggle sesh over all of them. Leeeeet's, GO!
I "learned" guitar on my own. Eventually I got to place where I got frustrated because I wasn't progressing. I quit about 10 years ago. After watching the Adam Neely post and finding 12 Tone on Youtube I decided to give it another try. I'm actually enjoying relearning how to play and how to think about what I'm playing.
Sorry for this, but I grew up as a sports guy. I taught myself how to golf. I generated a technique that allowed my to hit the ball in the air and land around the green. I had to take a PE course to get into to university so I chose golf. The instructor pretty much told me everything I was doing was wrong. So he started me from the beginning; this is how you grip a club, don't sway, twist, pretend you're tossing a watermelon on your backswing... I still suck at golf but at least I can more or less know where my shot's going. Same with guitar, I have an idea why I hit a certain note.
Golf probably isn't going to go over well here, but I'll take the heat. (I only play 3 par btw)
Nah, that analogy is pretty much right on the money. Intuition can get you incredibly far with music, but understanding WHY something works when it does work just makes life so much easier.
It's funny, I kind of had the same experience but backwards. I started learning music by taking Bass lessons, went to school for music, and got to the point where I could sight read music pretty damn well... but I was absolutely horrible at improvising or coming up with my own material and was petrified whenever anyone from class asked me to 'jam'. It's only the past couple of years that I've really dived into being creative and coming up with my own stuff, and ironically enough a ton of music theory stuff that I had learned in the past makes way more sense now that I actually have to apply it. I'm still crap, but it's getting better!
I always oscilate between loving and hating the theoretical framework. I think the healthiest approach towards it is as a tool to understand why some progressions work, but not why they should be there. Ultimately it's more like grammar to a language, and true poetry is never grounded in a search for the best application of grammar rules.
For me, if we stick to harmony, a lot of times it's an incidental result of chromatic movement. You can then circlejerk over how I just played an Eb9dim5 and it's functioning like a subdominant tritone-replacement. But, more likely, I just moved this way with the bass, and moved the voicing a bit from what was already there, thinking about where I want to land, and complicated chord machine goes brrr.
That is way better put then I ever could, but that's pretty much exactly how I try to think about it. In my eyes, if something works and sounds good in music, then you don't really need to question it too much even if it doesn't "make sense" when you try to apply the amount of music theory that you do know to it. I always figure it would probably make sense in someone elses eyes that knows more theory than I do, haha.