Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People
Teaching music theory is <i>damned hard</i>.<p>You very quickly find yourself making statements like this (taken from the second PDF in this series):
"A tuplet is any non-standard division of a note.  These are usually written as a group of notes delineated with a bracket and a number showing the division being made."  It's correct in grammar and sense, and about as exciting as a lawn-mower repair manual.<p>This is probably the best series of music theory cheatsheets I've ever seen, though... just about any other music theory resource you can find, online or off, gets bogged down <i>immediately</i> in sleep-inducing language.  I had to poke around a bit to find the example above.<p>The real problem is the "building blocks" approach to music theory pedagogy; that is, making students learn all of the basic concepts before they can do anything remotely interesting or useful.<p>It's really, really logical.  It's also a sort of mental torture, in the realm of music theory, because a lot of the building blocks are arbitrarily weird for historical reasons, and it takes too much meaningless memorization before you can do something as trivial as sight-reading a piece of music you could <i>already pick out by ear 10x faster</i>.  What about doing basic analysis of a piece of music?  So, so many building blocks required first....<p>I think it's possible to make learning theory enjoyable, but it'd be damned hard (and not possible in a static form).<p>That said, if you have the external motivation already to make the slog through the basics, these are solid references to help get the details straight in your head.