Introduction
Hello! I'm Alex Esc, a musician and producer from Mexico. And like many starting musicians I started my journey by looking up online tutorials for playing songs I like and understanding how to play a specific type of chord or scale.
Eventually I became very disappointed with the online resources I found, many articles and videos contradicted each other. Pop music resources claimed some advanced concepts are useless so they never bothered to teach them, meanwhile some classical music resources claimed pop music is soulless and stupid because they did not understand said concepts, but they teach them in vocabularies completely alien for someone that learned the basics from pop resources.
Caught in the middle of the crossfire between classical and pop music I became frustrated with the bad pedagogy that came from this conflict. Sometimes debate can further knowledge, but it seemed that internet creators, teachers and musicians could not get it straight and teach some consistent and simple music theory.
Lucky me, a big name music school from Mexico's capital city just started a campus here in my hometown. The school offers bachelors in music performance, composition and music production / engineering. The school's philosophy is that all students must have good and all-rounded music education. Meaning for the first couple of semesters the entire alumni study performance, composition and production. A great classically trained guitarist is hopeless if they can't make a professional recording, a producer is lost if they can't write a song and a composer can't get a good gig if they can't project their idea into Pro Tools.
I am more interested in production, so I enrolled in the production and engineering major and even tough I enrolled in music school to mix and produce I became exposed to classical piano training and contemporary jazz harmony classes and I have completely falling in love! Finally I had professional guidance through music theory and it has completely changed the way I see art and music.
Theory is now a topic I hold dear to my heart and I love teaching people about it. I have been thinking in publishing the entirety of my school notebooks for some time now, and although I won't post everything I will be condensing down some of the info to hopefully end up with a comprehensive guide of theory.