Music Theory Tree

Music Theory Tree (Saturday 8 March, 2025)

Music Theory Tree (MTT) is an innovative, visual approach to teaching and learning music theory.

Using a systematic set of shapes and musical symbols, the MTT Maps show the relationships between fundamental music theory concepts. These include everything from pitch classes, scale degrees, and intervals, to chords, modes, keys, and beyond; all combined into one color-coded, intuitive system. It may be used to describe and study any major or minor scale, or other heptatonic scales, such as harmonic minor, melodic minor, and harmonic major.

Image. Chromatic circle diagrams of the four common heptatonic scales (Wikipedia).

The MTT may be expanded to its Dual-Orbit version to show the fractal relationships between chords and their parallel keys, or to the MTT Torus of 5ths, for a broad overarching view of Western harmony.

The Posters
I recently bought the posters of the Single-Orbit and Dual-Orbit MTT.

The Single-Orbit MTT connects all of the pitch classes of a scale, and the intervals that separate them. This allows one to make connections between the chords in a musical key, and how they correspond to given scale degrees, by tracing the paths between vertices in a seven-circle Venn diagram. This is all housed inside a simple, seven-sided polygon called a heptagon.

Once one has a foundation for how notes and chords connect within a single key, and wants to take it a step further to understand modulations and key changes through compositional techniques like modal interchange, the Dual-Orbit MTT takes the Single-Orbit and shows one how chords or even pitches in a given key can be transformed into their own key centers.

Part of the Single-Orbit  is explained in the following (lengthy) video and [here] on FaceBook.

MTT at Skippy Studio