Gargoyle, I hope we're not going to have a return to the "I'm right and you're an idiot" tenor of your previous incarnation. You had contributed an awful lot of very good information on this thread--and several other recent ones: personally, I'm happy you're back, but I'm a bit uneasy about it as well.

Music theory IS easy and logical, when presented well--but many people, particularly those who learned from pedagogues who forced-fed it, end up afraid of it. What I have I got more or less by osmosis: I did learn the basics of music transcription in early music lessons, but had no idea of the meaning of it other than that the lines in the treble clef could be remembered as Every Good Boy Does Fine and the spaces as FACE, that the bass cleff was Good Boys Do Fine Always and All Cows Eat Grass, that natural notes were the white keys of the piano keyboard, that if they were sharped or flatted they became black notes, and about basic rhythmic patterns, note lengths, bars, etc. Knowledge about harmonic structure came as I needed it: tonic and dominant and subdominant chords, majors and minors and sevenths and the rest, the rule of fifths and its usefulness in transcribing tunes to fit my range and in figuring out chord progressions by ear, came as my ear developed and my repertoire grew. But if all this had been presented to me as stuff I had to memorize without knowing its usefulness, I'd probably never have got it. Not that I have enough of it for you to consider me a musician--but I'll bet Rick does, and does a damned good job of communicating it.

--seed