In the ten years I've been playing guitar I never learnt anything beyond Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit and how to read guitar tab. Everything else is pure practice and memory. Only in 2000 did I start to bother learning which notes (ABCDEFG) the frets on the guitar played and started learning the names of chords. I'd picked most of it up by accident but I'd never sat down and LEARNT that what I was playing was a Cmaj chord.

I've always felt that, because I like what I do, that if I learnt musical theory, somehow that would ruin what I did because I'd fall back on theory instead of luck. The magic would somehow be gone.

That may well still be true.

However we've been playing with someone recently. They've never been in a band and have learnt via musical theory. So they ask us things like "what key is this song in?"

I don't know the answers. And it seems that is really does matter, depending on how you've come at learning the guitar.

We've always been happy passing guitar tab around and just learning it. Musically theory seems to be a short hand.

You can say that a song is "in the key of F major" and you don't have to tell anyone anything else.

I suppose that's magic.

I think I've reached the point where I'm no longer so up myself as to realise that I still have a hell of a lot to learn, and I'll be better off because of it.

I also no longer care about the magic.

I've found some (what appear to be) excellent free guitar leasons, including a whole series on music theory. I'll be reading and playing with these over the next few weeks.

It'll be fun, because I have a back catalog of thirty plus songs to which I can apply what I learn. It'll be interesting to see why they worked, or why they're "wrong".

I'm pretty confident that the last ten years of shunning theory should shield me from any "should" and "shouldn't" I might encounter along the way.

Mum told me once I should never start a sentence with "and", "but" or "because". Because it doesn't sound right? And looks bad? But why?!