Hello Scott, A very interesting premiss…

This is an excellent question, Adam! I'm sure you're not alone in asking it. There are many ways I could answer this question but I'll try to answer it in non-technical terms. Learning to play an instrument is, on the most basic level, learning how to make pleasing sounds. It's the mechanical stuff... where to put your hands and fingers on the guitar to make the sounds you want to make, whether it be learning how to pick, make chords, strum, perform hammer-ons and pull-offs, and so on. You literally don't need to know theory to play an instrument, and as I mentioned many musicians don't even bother with it. If you have a great ear you can get far; sometimes very far, as in the case of Django Reinhardt for example. However, learning theory provides the, well, theoretical side to the music which compliments the mechanical. It helps make sense of why those few chords or scales you picked up from a friend, or YouTube, sound the way they do. It also helps you build chords and scales yourself, taking away much of the trial and error. Learning theory helps you analyze and understand songs and their structure, their emotional weight based on what humans find pleasing (or not so pleasing), based on the physical frequencies we are most attuned to respond to. Learning to play an instrument, more often than not, only allows you to play the songs, without providing deeper understanding. To finish, I'll put it another way, in terms I heard once. Playing an instrument without knowing music theory is like learning how to navigate a new town. My trial and error, driving here and there, you learn some good routes, getting where you need to go most of the time. You pick up a few good tips or shortcuts from a friend, helping improve the process. This can be seen as being similar to learning those first few 'riffs', scales, or chords from a friend or YouTube with no theory involved. Learning music theory gives you the whole map. It will take a while to process and memorize the map, but by doing so you can now choose to go anywhere you like using any route you like, and you'll understand why you've chosen to do so. You can take simple routes, complicated routes; it's all up to you at that point. You can make much more informed choices. Thanks again for the question, and I hope this made some sense to you! :D