J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Music Theory And Excel

At Mac Mojo: A Circle of Fifths: How I Learned Music Theory using Excel.

Blair Neumann writes:

While I've played guitar for almost 20 years, I've also spent most of those two decades stubbornly refusing to learn any music theory. "My guitar gods had self-taught so why should I not do the same?" I reasoned. But I recently discovered that I really do want to understand (if not practice) music theory, so I turned to several sources, one of which was Excel.

"Why use Excel to teach yourself music theory?" I ask myself. To which I retort, "Music theory is all about patterns in series and Excel is an excellent and convenient tool for generating such series and manipulating them to expose their patterns." Convinced, I opened my MacBook and launched Excel in hopes of discovering the patterns underlying the Circle of Fifths.

A long time ago, I also created a music-related workbook. It's available here: Guitar Scales and Modes. It really needs to up updated.

(Thanks Peter van Impelen)