Can You Make Music Without Knowing Music Theory? Yes, Here's How

Yes, you can make music without knowing music theory, and plenty of songwriters do. You need a small set of notes that fit together and your own ears to choose between them. Scale-locked pads and chord buttons handle the fitting part, so you can write songs now and pick up theory later, one useful piece at a time.

Do you need music theory to write songs?

No. Music theory is a set of names for sounds people already liked, written down so musicians could talk about them. The sounds came first. Blues and folk songs were passed from player to player by ear long before anyone wrote them out, and Paul McCartney has said he doesn’t read a note of music. As a boy he was advised to take piano lessons and preferred to learn by ear.

Here is what a song does need:

• Ears. Years of listening have already taught you when a note sounds off and when a song feels finished. That covers a lot of what theory describes, minus the vocabulary.
• Notes that fit. This is the one job theory usually does for a beginner, and an instrument locked to a scale can do it instead.
• Steady time. Listeners forgive a plain chord much sooner than a wobbly beat, so playing roughly in time with a click matters more than clever harmony.
• A finished version. A rough 90-second song with a start and an end teaches you more than ten 8-bar loops that never go anywhere.

What theory adds is speed and shared words. When you can hear a chord but can’t find it, theory tells you where to look, and it lets you describe a whole song to a bandmate in one sentence. It won’t write the idea for you, and not knowing it won’t stop an idea from being good.

How to write a song without knowing music theory

Make the decisions theory would make for you up front, then spend your attention on the tune. These six steps take you from nothing to a short song in C major.

1. Pick one key and stay in it: C major. On a piano that means only the white keys, C D E F G A B, and every chord in the key is built from them. The chords in C major page lists all seven, with progressions you can play right on the page.
2. Loop four chords. Play C, G, Am and F, one bar each, over and over. Start the same four on Am instead (Am, F, C, G) and the loop turns wistful with no new notes. You can hear both orders on the free online chord player in your browser.
3. Hum over the loop. Let it repeat and hum into your phone’s voice recorder for five minutes without stopping to judge. Most of it will be forgettable. Keep the one or two bits still in your head an hour later.
4. Find those notes with a safe set. Try C, D, E, G and A first. That is the C major pentatonic scale: five notes with no half steps between them, so no two of them grind the way B and C or E and F do. End each phrase on a note from the chord underneath: E or G over C, G or D over G, A or C over Am and F.
5. Borrow a layout from a song you like. Put on a favorite, count the bars in its verse and note where the chorus arrives. Many pop sections run 8 bars, which is the four-chord loop played twice. Copy that shape with your own chords and tune. Nobody owns verse, chorus, verse.
6. Make the chorus lift. Keep the same chords if you like, but change something: sing the chorus a few notes higher than the verse, or hold the drums back until the chorus. A listener hears the lift even when the chords stay put.

When a hummed note won’t match anything, try the white key one step up or down before you give up on the phrase; the right note is usually next door. For noodling with no plan, switch to the five black keys (F#, G#, A#, C# and D#). They form a pentatonic scale of their own, so you can press them in any order and nothing sours.

Shortcuts that do the theory for you: locked scales and chord buttons

The safe set in step 4 is a hand-made version of what many instruments now do for you. There are two common kinds, plus loops, which hand you whole parts.

Locked scales. You pick a key and a scale, and the instrument only offers those notes. In GarageBand on iPhone, tap the Keyboard’s Scale button and choose a scale, and the piano keys turn into note bars that play only that scale. Ableton’s Push controller has an In Key mode that does the same on its pads. Gelato Synth, our synth app, works this way in its free Notes mode: pick a root and one of nine scales, and the pads are only that scale’s notes, three rows for three octaves, with each scale degree always the same color.

Chord buttons. Each major key has seven chords built only from its seven notes. They are called diatonic chords, and you can move between any of them without leaving the key. A chord-button instrument puts a chord under each button, so you never have to work out which chords those are. The pocket HiChord has seven chord buttons for the seven chords of one key. The Suzuki Omnichord takes a different route, with a grid of chord buttons sorted by root and type (major, minor, 7th and more), so you still choose which ones belong together. GarageBand’s Keyboard has chord strips that play a whole chord per tap. Gelato Chord, our chord app, has seven keys that always play the seven chords of your key, each labeled with its name, plus a melody plate of strings tuned to the key where the ones in your current chord light up.

Loops and samples. A drum loop or a recorded chord part arrives already played and in time. You decide what goes on top and how long each section lasts.

Shortcuts keep you in key, and that is all they promise. A melody made only of safe notes can still be dull, because rhythm and repetition are what make a tune stick. A scale lock or a seven-button chord layout also hides everything outside the key. Plenty of songs in C major reach for a Bb or an Fm, and neither is on those seven buttons. When you start hearing chords like those in your head and can’t find them, that is your cue to learn a little theory.

Does music theory help songwriting? When to learn a little

Yes, once you have songs to hang it on. Theory is easier to learn at that point, because each idea attaches to a sound you already made. Pick it up in roughly this order:

1. Major vs minor. A major chord has its third four semitones above the root (C E G). A minor chord has it three semitones up (C Eb G). Swap C for Cm in your loop and that one lowered note turns the chord dark.
2. The seven chords of a key. Every major key follows the same pattern: major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished. In C that gives C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am and Bdim. With the pattern you can find the chords in any key without a chart.
3. Numbers instead of names. In C major, the loop C, G, Am, F is 1-5-6-4, written I V vi IV in Roman numerals. In G major the same numbers give G, D, Em and C. Numbers let you move a song into a key that suits your voice, and let you hand a bandmate the whole progression as four digits.
4. The relative minor. C major and A minor share the same seven notes. That is why starting the step 2 loop on Am changed its mood without adding a note: your ear starts to hear Am as home.
5. One chord from outside the key. Play C, F, Fm, C and listen to the Ab in Fm (F Ab C) slide down to the G in the last C chord. Bb works too, as in C, Bb, F, C. Chords taken from outside the key like this are called borrowed chords.

Try each idea in the next song you write before moving on. Reading notation and the rules of counterpoint can wait, possibly for good, if your goal is writing songs on a phone or a guitar.

Can you make beats without knowing music theory?

Yes, and beats ask for even less theory than songs. Most drum sounds don’t care what key you are in, so a drum pattern has no wrong notes to hit. A solid starting pattern: kick on beats 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, hi-hat on every eighth note, at around 90 BPM. From there, move one kick or add one hi-hat at a time and keep whatever makes you nod along. The guide to making beats on iPhone walks through a first beat step by step.

The place pitch sneaks in is the bass. An 808 or a synth bass plays real notes, and one that clashes with your chords or sample makes the whole beat sound sour. The simplest bass line that works plays the root of each chord, the note the chord is named after: C, G, A and F under C, G, Am and F, each landing on beat 1 of its bar. If you are building on a sample and don’t know its chords, loop it and try bass notes one at a time until each change has one that sounds settled, then set the 808 to those notes. Play the bass on a scale-locked instrument set to the same key as your chords and it stays in key on its own.