How to Study Flip It's Music Genres & Instruments Deck: 60 Cards of Core Theory

Flip It's Music Genres & Instruments deck (code QH1795, 60 cards) has a misleading name. Open it expecting bebop versus hard bop, or the difference between an oboe and a cor anglais, and you will find neither: there is not a single genre card, and exactly one instrument appears — the Chinese pipa, and only because it carried the modal theory behind the Sui and Tang system of 84 modes. What the deck actually contains is a compact, well-built tour of music theory. Go in knowing that and it becomes one of the fastest theory primers in the library.

What the 60 cards really cover

Pitch and the 440 Hz tuning of concert A · intervals and octaves · the chromatic scale and the semitone · major and pentatonic scales · equal temperament · key signatures · transposition · the circle of fifths · consonance and dissonance · rhythm, meter and time signatures · syncopation and polyrhythm · melody and its elements · chords, triads, seventh chords, chord qualities and progressions · harmony and counterpoint · polyphony · timbre and overtones · dynamics (forte, piano, crescendo, diminuendo) · articulation (staccato, legato) · texture (monophonic, polyphonic, homophonic) · musical form, canon, arpeggio, orchestration, ornamentation · and a short history tail: the medieval quadrivium, Sumerian clay tablets, the Natya Shastra, mensural notation and Boethius.

Eight cards from the deck

Read it as three blocks

Cards 1–17 are the pitch system (frequency, intervals, scales, temperament, keys). Cards 18–52 are the parameters of sound: rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, dynamics, articulation, texture, form. Cards 53–59 jump to history. That last block is the one people skip and the one music-appreciation exams love, so review it separately rather than letting it trail off at the end of a session.

Two things to fix before you drill

Check the overlap first. Forty-two of these 60 fronts are word-for-word identical to the Music Theory: Notes, Scales, Chords & Rhythm deck (NG1369). If you have already run that one, suspend the repeats: the genuinely new material here is the dynamics and articulation vocabulary, the consonance/dissonance pair, pitch and concert A, what determines timbre, the four chord qualities, and the history cards.

Card 17 needs a caveat. It lists the perfect fourth among the consonances. That is the acoustic classification, but in common-practice counterpoint a fourth against the bass is treated as a dissonance that must resolve. Add "except against the bass" to the back, or you will answer part-writing questions wrong.

One last thing: every back here is a verbal definition, so the deck trains vocabulary, not ears. Keep a keyboard or a tone generator open and play the item as you answer — consonance, dissonance and the three textures are close to meaningless as strings of words.

Deck QH1795, "Music Genres & Instruments", is in the Flip It library at flip-it.app.

Related: Master Music Theory: Notes, Scales, Chords and Rhythm in 100 Flashcards · Memorize 60 Classical Composers and the Works That Made Them Famous