this is Dave and this is Chris we're from Hooktheory and you're listening to
the Musicality Podcast. Ever wondered why some people seem to have a gift for
music have you ever wished that you could play by ear sing in tune improvise
and jam you're in the right place time to turn those wishes into reality
welcome to the Musicality Podcast with your host Christopher Sutton. Hi
this is Christopher founder of Musical U and welcome to the Musicality
Podcast today I'm talking with Dave Carlton and Chris Anderson two of the
three creators of hooktheory one of my favorite music learning websites and one
that can transform the way you understand melodies and harmony in the
music you love ryan meuk our the third member of the hook theory team couldn't
be with us today but we're hoping to have him on the show for a follow-up
episode in future hooktheory is one of a handful of websites that I am
constantly recommending to people who are learning music and looking for
easier ways to understand music theory I've been continually impressed with
their approach and the quality of the teaching they provide and it was a real
delight to immerse myself last year in the to hook theory books hook theory is
a new way of visualizing notes and chords in music as well as a very
different and in my opinion far more effective and interesting way of
teaching core music theory concepts in songwriting in this conversation we
talked about the quite different musical backgrounds that the three hook theory
creators have and what they found a shared passion for that led to them
creating hooktheory together we talk about what makes book very different and
why that might matter to you and we talk about whether or not interactive tools
like hook pad which make it easy to write music with assistance from the
computer are removing the need a learning music theory yourself if you've
never been to hook Theory comm I know this conversation will inspire you to go
dive in and if you've seen hooktheory in action then I know you're going to
enjoy this peek behind the scenes of where such a cool project came from
and what's in store for the future my name is Christopher Sutton and this is
the musicality podcast from a Musical U welcome to the show Dave and Chris
thank you for joining us today hey Christopher great to be here yeah I
agree thanks Christopher it's good to talk to you so I'd love to begin at the
beginning and understand because Hooktheory is a really interesting project
in terms of the way you approach music theory and learning to write music I'd
love to understand where each of you is coming from in terms of music how you
got started and what music education looked like for each of you sure you all
take the lead so I'm a self-taught guitar player and I also play a little
bit piano and I I picked up guitar when I was about 21 it was my third year of
college and I'm I spent the summer at this internship I moved in with one of
my college buddies and he had this really sweet us like Fender Strat and I
just always saw it over in the corner of the room and he'd play it every now and
then I'm like hey could you show me a couple chords and so start playing
guitar and you know I would say I was a very typical like self-taught guitar
player you know looked up tabs for like Wonderwall and Led Zeppelin songs and
just kind of like continue to get better playing and learn more and more songs
and yeah like eventually I met Ryan who's one of the other hook theory
people and this was probably years after so my first year at grad school and he
ended up teaching me a little bit of music theory and so that ended up having
like a huge influence on on my musical endeavors but um yeah I definitely have
no formal music education in fact I I don't I mean I can read sheet music cuz
like technically I know how to do it but I wouldn't say I'm the type of person
that looks at sheet music and plays it I think Dave comes from like a completely
different yeah I certainly grew up I guess I would call myself classically
trained I grew up playing the piano from a pretty early age
and then played the trumpet and high school band as well as college but I
wouldn't call myself I wasn't a very serious musician I certainly was no
practicing a lot but I wasn't going into big big important recitals or anything
so it wasn't really until college and I took a lot of music classes in college
and really got interested in then and that's kind of when I think our shared
interest for starting something like very I began when we got more serious
about music yeah and then there's Ryan who's not here right now but he the guy
like one of his first memories as a kid is literally like sneaking down to they
had a piano at their house and he would like sneaked down to the piano and play
like little like not I don't know if it was pop songs because he was like such a
kid but like little tunes he'd hear from like a cartoon or something that he
would really like but he wasn't allowed to play those during his like music
lessons so he would like sneak down and play those and so he he grew up with
like a super formal you know education from a very very young age and you know
he has like perfect pitch knew just incredible songwriter just musically
just incredibly solid I mean you could put him in a room any musician in the
world he could like you hold his own and and so he I think like is sort of the
the music glue that kind of brought the three of us together I would say to mine
and I actually grew up get going on it really really good friends growing up we
went to the same elementary school high school college grad schools so we go
back a long ways and definitely would second everything that Chris said about
his he's definitely a I would consider musical genius very cool and so it
sounds like you each have quite different musical backgrounds maybe a
debut and Ryan have a bit more in common in terms of the classical training yeah
myself very much in the middle yeah and so I think as you say it's it's a it's
kind of an interesting mix because it really covers a lot of bases from the
casual guitarists to the really serious musician - and I'm in-between
how did that work for you guys because you know from my part
knowing musicians they don't always play well with others
particularly what you have that difference in backgrounds did you guys
just find you clicked were there any awkward moments trying to
find musical common ground or well so I think like we I mean we came together
just as friends right so I met the two of them in grad school and they had
already known each other for like a long time as David said and I came into the
group and we were just buddies for for several years and but it was really I
think you know when Ryan so there's a there's a part I got left out which is
when I first got to Berkeley like I you know I'd already been playing guitar for
a couple years and then as I started hanging out with Ryan I would sometimes
like you know have my guitar with me and there's this there's just one moment
that just I'll never forget which is one of the first times I came over to his
house and I was sitting in the living room just strumming some chords on my
Taylor guitar and he was in the other room like doing dishes like not even
looking at me and I had strummed a couple chords and they just hear him
like kind of turn off the sink and he says play a b-minor and I'm I just so I
play a B minor and it was it was literally just like the exact perfect
next chord and I'm like how did he how did he know that like not only did he
know like what chords I was already playing so he could have he was able to
hear that but then he knew like what would sound good next so I was kind of
the beginning of like how did you know that and so he started teaching me
essentially the basics of music theory and how music works but he did it in the
just the most awesome intuitive simple way like there was no sheet music he
just like explained things in a very fundamental simple way and after about a
year of that I was like I always in the back of my mind was thinking like god I
bet you every other musician in the world would love to have someone like
Ryan teach them and that that in my mind was like this seed of kind of like hook
theory actually didn't that was even like years before we ever even started
building hook theory but was this this way that Ryan taught me and so we
always knew that there was this kind of unmet demand of all these self-taught
you know musicians that you know either can't read sheet music or don't have
formal training and music theory is super intimidating to them and that
would love this information and but but they need it like a consumable like you
know delightful kind of like intuitive way to learn it and so it was easy to
answer your question like we just came together and and there was no question
about kind of what we wanted to do and where we thought that the gap was cool
and one thing I'm always keen to ask about when I talk to people like
yourselves who started these phenomenal projects what gave you the drive to
create something you'd had this insight that there was a better way to learn
music theory and you did enjoyed the benefit of it for yourself
but I know firsthand how hard it is to create something from nothing and get it
out there and get it in a form that people like and enjoy and can use so
what was it that brought the three of you together to actually make that
happen question I think I think all three of us really liked teaching and we
also liked building stuff together as friends so kind of combining those two
together it kind of made it easy and it was just a fun fun thing for us to do so
we just and enjoy working on it and if it wasn't something that we enjoy doing
we wouldn't be doing it as long as we have yeah I mean when we when we first
started we would just as like every week we would meet at Ryan Ryan and Dave
lived together at the time and we would I would just go over their house at like
eight o'clock at night and we would just sit up in Ryan's room until like 2:30 in
the morning and just start like writing software and developing like our
teaching method and the visualizations and all that stuff and it was like one
of the funnest times I mean it was so cool I just like building something I
mean I don't know it was like right after kind of like that Facebook movie
came out and you know it was like just you could just see like how awesome it
can be to like build something not that we're anything close to Facebook but but
yeah I was fine it was it was great and so at the
three of you all software developers by background you will have that skill set
to build something in terms of web software yeah yeah we're all engineers
by day so that's a kind of a shared skill that we all have so it's
definitely been very useful to be able to apply that that knowledge to music
and run write software help people learn and Dave you mentioned something before
about how you're you consider yourself at a classical musician and I think it
might surprise some people that from that background you've created as part
of a team a product that is so clearly oriented towards the creative side of
music making because you know the classical way of learning music is
really about reproducing other people's repertoire on your instrument to a large
extent or very rigid structured composition I'd love to hear what was it
that led you to that approach to music or that outlook on what music making can
be yeah I mean for me growing up as a classically trained musicians musician
quote/unquote it was always still very mysterious because you know I knew I
knew all my scales and I could play on the instruments but as you say it's very
much just reproducing songs that other people have written and I really had no
idea frankly how to how to go from a scale to a full song and it was
something that Ryan obviously knew how to do and once I got to college and
learned some more music theory I had kind of picked some more stuff up but it
was always kind of a mystery and it was always something that I was very
interested and and didn't feel like there were any good resources available
despite the interest that I had even even as a classically trained musician I
felt like I was kind of lacking and in resources
yeah and I'll just add to that which is like you know as someone who you know
couldn't read sheet music and you know I was in grad school for you know like
engineering and you know I'm fine learning new things but it was just like
it felt like just such a huge barrier I'm like oh god I got it learn how to
read sheet music before I can even get started under
these concepts it was like no I'm not anything about of that with that you
know and um so yeah seeing there was a where there was a path to the
information that just like literally leapfrogged over the notation was was
awesome and we're like we got a share this with everybody yeah and this may or
may not be the same question as what makes hook very different and innovative
but you mentioned that Ryan had a particular way of explaining things that
just made it so much easier and you wanted to share that way of teaching
music with a larger audience what was it that characterized that what made it so
different and so effective for you well so the first thing and this may sound
just just so incredibly simple but was the idea of songs kind of being in in a
key and that you can name the chords by the the number chord they are in the key
so so let's go with like a simple example of chords that probably most
people have played before like if you play a G chord and then a D chord and
then a C chord those are all in the key of G and the G chord would be called
like the first chord because it's it's the G chord and you're in the the G
scale and then you know the D chord would be called the five chord and the C
chord would be called the four chord and that was like really the beginning of
what Ryan was teaching me he's like so you know when you play those chords he's
like try in your head to just think of them as one five four you know don't
think of them necessarily as G DC and then he's like so you can take that same
pattern one five four and you know play it in in a different key for example so
you know if you were going to start out in a key of D that same pattern one five
four would be like the D chord the a chord and then the G chord and so I was
like oh wow so you can actually take you sort of you take the chord names which
there are so many chord names right because there's basically like twelve
different you know major keys there's all these different chord names and
sharps and flats blah blah blah like you can just boil it down to these
seven numbers and that to me was just like really beautiful aha moment so I
started thinking of songs that be like oh you know I want to play this um you
know Guns and Roses song you'd be like oh that's just a one four six
you know progression and it was like it doesn't even matter what the key I play
it in I just played in whatever key I want and and it'll still fundamentally
sound the same so that like basic concept was was the thing that just I
was like this is so simple how come this isn't just common knowledge everywhere
and yes it's certainly that yeah and I think beyond beyond that just and then
the fact that there's tendencies that certain chords within that seven chord
system go together in different ways and you know if you have you're playing a
discord there's another chord that a very likely set will sound good if you
play it next is it's also kind of the next the next step beyond that and I was
found that those are some of the tendencies that I didn't really know and
found really fascinating as I was kind of learning my music theory and harmony
hmm I've said this on the podcast a few times at this point but I I'm still kind
of confused as to why this isn't a bigger part of music education and for
me growing up in the UK instrument learning system you know when you
studied music theory you got a bit into functional harmony and you would have
the basic intellectual understanding that yes you can number the chords in
the key and you probably did some exercises to figure out what they'd be
in different keys but nobody made that bridge to the songs I was actually
playing and what this might mean for playing by ear or how this might apply
to figuring out melodies or improvising melodies and one of the things I loved
about hook theory is that you so naturally bridge those two worlds you
know you're rooted in functional harmony and how things have always worked but
you're talking very much in practical terms and using song examples that a
hundred percent makes sense to people and
yeah I just think I still find it kind of flabbergasting but this isn't normal
it sounds like you guys were feeling a bit the same like quiet
I know what this way to me it's always I mean it's scales are very important and
you know and doing these intellectual exercises are super crucial but it's
kind of that was what music theory meant to me and so it didn't have the
connection to real music and that's kind of one of the things that we tried to
try to make hmm so that's clearly one of the really defining things about hook
theory that you're looking at everything in these functional terms you're talking
about notes and chords relative to the tonic and so relative to the key one of
the other things that I think jumps out to someone who comes to hook theory but
for the first time is that it's very colorful which isn't something we
normally associate with music you know if you look at traditional staff
notation it's black and white that's that tell us a bit about that color
system and why it is such a colorful way of representing music yeah so we color
every all the scale degrees these numbers of the scale we give them the
colors of the rainbow and the reason we do that is to emphasize that regardless
of what what key you're in what are you gonna keep see in the key of G that one
chord or that that first note of the scale is always going to be red and kind
of keep you grounded in that in that in this functional system I mean and also I
think one of the other reasons we do it is to reinforce the functionality of
each of these notes in the scale by giving it by giving another sense and a
color in this case to the to the scale degrees it reinforces it and kind of
another ear training device to kind of help with that yeah and I would just to
add to that this was right around the time when guitar hero which is that game
that was on Playstations had just just exploded and it just got so much
traction and you know the simple beauty of that game was you had this controller
with four square buttons there were four different colors and you had basically
four different like coloreds on the on the video game screen and you would just
match color to color and we just knew that that was like an interface that
people find intuitive and that cut you know colors just
humans like color and so it's a nice tool to quickly trigger memory and like
help you recognize patterns so it's like you can just look at a song and hook
theory and be like oh that's red red blue green purple and maybe that's to
you what what what you know a one-one I guess that's one one five or six or I
don't even know what colors I said but maybe to you like red red green blue
purple is is the sound right and then that's that's cool and originally rocks
Orion is just a side note because this is kind of a funny story so Ryan has
synesthesia which is this this really really interesting condition for those
of you don't know about it where he literally associates everything with a
color like I mean everything so it's something like a musical pitch is like a
very specific color to him like I am a color to him like Chris is a color to
him like Dave's a color to him everything's color so he already had all
these colors for like scale degrees and they were these random colors and he
like really really really wanted them to be his color so I was like no man we
have to do the rainbow like we're not we're not betting on this I think I
think he's finally okay with our color system that's great I think it's a
really elegant solution you know it makes me think of the code I approach to
sulfur where you don't just have a name for each node you have a hand sign too
and it gives you that physical sense of you know what dough is and how gray
relates to it and so on and I think it's so powerful for giving the brain another
handle on what's going on in the music you hear so when we spoke and back in
2000 I think 13 you guys have been up and running for a little while but it
was still fairly early days and one of the things that was jumping out then was
that hook theory was getting used a lot by songwriters to understand you know
what our normal chord progressions and what are the options in terms of chords
in songs is that what led on to the hook theory
books or was that something that was always part of the vision for what
theory could be said the books were really kind of running from the
beginning we really had this his method in mind for hat and what we wanted it we
had something to say about how we wanted to teach music and we were going to
write those books and so that was really part of it from the beginning yeah yeah
so for I mean the the second book just came out by about a year ago actually
and that's like the intermediate advanced level stuff but we really like
hook theory literally started with the first book I mean that that was almost
at you know all of hook theory in the beginning and then as we built be like
music examples for the book so the books filled with all these music concepts and
then every time we teach concept will show how it's done in a real song so you
know we analyzed probably you know a few hundred little clips of like Bob Dylan
songs and you know Aerosmith songs and this and that in the first book and then
we were like well these things kind of standalone and then we had this idea
what if we could make a whole part of the website where you could actually see
like the theory behind you know real songs that you like instead of looking
up a guitar tab you could we could look up like the functional chord changes and
and melody changes and that was so when when we launched it was essentially the
first book and then this part of the website where at the time there now
called theory tabs but at the time I don't even know what we called them we
called them analyses I think yeah something that's cool yeah but that was
really that was where we started listen I wrote reviews of the to hook theory
books last year on our website and I think I said in one of the reviews you
know this is very much the music theory book I wish I'd had and I think there
are two amazing things that do set it apart from your traditional music theory
book and the first is just the overall approach the fact that you are
explaining things not you know here are the rules the
is how it's always worked learn the rules and apply them but let's look at
songs what the songs do why do the chords do this in songs how can we learn
from that you know it's very much that practical and modern perspective on
quite music theory matters and the other amazing thing is that you know it's hard
to really convey in an audio form like this I'll put links to the reviews in
the show notes so people can read and see screenshots and videos there but you
know these are books in the very modern sense of the word this is something you
use on your computer or your tablet it's got embedded videos it's got sound
examples and you guys pack it with very clear vivid illustrations animations
really of what's going on in the song as you hear it and I just I am jealous in a
way of today's musician that gets to come up and use that as their theory
book because I think it totally transforms your relationship to what
theory can be and what it can do for you well thank you I mean that's exactly why
we created them I mean yeah yeah you couldn't have said it yes
that's yes that's right that's why they exist I mean yeah we we bought the same
way and the the last piece of the puzzle as it were I suppose is the footpad
system which gives people an interactive environment for putting all of this into
practice and starting to experiment can you tell us a bit about how that works
yeah it uses the same system with the colors and and and I'm thinking about
music functionally as as the system we teach in the book but it's a very quick
way of writing out your chord progressions and and melodies in this in
this system and so a lot of composers and songwriters will very quickly fire
up hook pad and then you want to write a quick progression one four five one five
six four you just type one five six four on the keyboard and boom you add your
your chord progression and it'll play it back for you and you can transpose it to
whatever key the key is sort of it's that doesn't doesn't really matter but
you can transpose it to whatever key you want and export it to your guitar tab or
your your conventional sheet music or if you want to compose something in
GarageBand or logic you can export it as a MIDI
so yeah we found it a very useful tool and for making connections to the book
so if you're using it as a companion while you're trying to learn it's great
for that but then if you want to try to write your own music it's great for that
too yeah so and then hook pad does some things that I still to this day just
think are literally like magical so one of the things that that it does that I
think is so cool is say you you you put in a chord progression like Dave said so
one five four for those of you that are new to these numbers let's pretend we're
in the key of G so I've put down a G chord a D chord in a C chord very
pleasant nice sounding chord progression what hook pad can do so hook pad has a
chord staff and then above it it's got a melody staff and hope ed can tell you
over each chord so I've there's three different chords there G DC over each
chord there's kind of a subset of notes that if you base your melody around
those notes your melody will kind of have this nice stable sound and it gives
you essentially like these guidelines for for how to kind of lay out your
melody it's not like oh use only these notes but it's just saying like hey you
know if you kind of make sure to include these notes at least probably half at
the time your melodies gonna sound pretty darn good and that is just the
coolest thing ever in my opinion and it's one of the things that actually
hook theory as a whole does is it shows you these relationships between not like
the chords on them on their own but then also like how the melody relates to the
chords and toe pads great for that another cool thing about hook pad is it
can help you find out a good next chord so like and it's called magic chord and
you just you can literally if you want just open hook pad and just hit magic
chord magic word magic word magic chord and it'll basically write like a little
song and that's really cool and when you do a magic chord it'll tell you the
context it'll say like oh and 1972 you know the Beatles use this chord in this
same way and yeah so just some things that Tim Eaton think
now they're just so normal because I've been using hook pad for so long but Wow
like like the ability to actually get a lot of help writing writing composing a
melody is something that the hook pad does that really I don't think anything
else can do that today there's nothing else so yeah that's cool and we're about
to release hook pad 2 which is going to have even more awesome stuff but that
was a brutal teaser do you have a release date in mind can we tell the
audience when to expect took about two yes so I think we were we started a year
ago it's been you know a ton of work we were hoping to do it to get it out
before then this year like I don't think we're gonna hit that we're but we're
really close so I would say really next year early early yeah early 2018 yeah
it's very it's getting very close yeah we're real excited about it
fantastic so the the two things you touched on there I think are great
examples of what makes your approach so innovative and interesting you know and
chord tones for example we had a recent podcast episode talking about how
training your ear to hear the notes in chords can let you write melodies or
play melodies by ear or improvise because you understand that connection
between the melody and the chords and similarly your magic chord feature does
sound like magic and at the same time it's something that you know some
writers traditionally have had to learn and internalized and kind of build up
their vocabulary of what chords work well together those are both things
where you know traditionally technology couldn't really help you and there's a
set of people these days who would argue that technology is removing the need to
develop those skills you know if you have a tool like hook pad do you really
need to understand what a one-four-five is if you can just press the button do
you really need to know how to listen for the notes in music if you can just
kind of try things out and hear them played for you where do you guys stand
on that you see technology replacing the need for that kind of traditional music
education well ok really certainly makes experimenting easier with different
sounds so in that way I guess it would help if you
didn't know anything but it's certainly that the more music theory you bring to
the table the richer your usability of hook pad is gonna be because it's it's
it's it's based on music theory and it talks the language of music theory so we
certainly are firmly in the camp that the more you know the the better your
songwriting is gonna be and he could you know to use an analogy it'd be pretty
ridiculous if you wanted to be a poet but you didn't think that you needed to
learn the language and you could just get around you know putting words
together randomly that you find in a word generator or something like that
right yeah I mean music is always gonna be art in addition to any sort of
scientific approach that one might take you know to to writing a song and yeah
it like this is like an even broader question right it's like we're getting
into this future now where like all these like artificial intelligence and
like virtual kind of intelligence things can help us do tasks in general like
possibly better and I think I think ultimately a like with music though it's
it's um there's yeah I think like in general that you don't ever want to be
so reliant on technology that that's all the only way you can do something you
know I think like there's always gonna be a moment when you'll be like sitting
around a campfire or something and you just need to rely on your own skills and
like you don't have a plan thank you so yeah I mean we we definitely view it
as a tool to help you explore to help you create and it's it's kind of like if
you were in a room with one of your good friends and they were also a good
musician and like they could bounce ideas you could bounce ideas off of them
that's like kind of like where we philosophically like see what that is
like this tool to have to help you but we don't also don't want it to be like
you know a crutch and that's like the only way you can can do things
kochu so we've talked about a few different things that
we talked about the theory tab where people can see the notes and chords of
popular music and start to get a sense of how it all fits together we talked
about the hook theory books which are very rich multimedia ways of exploring
this functional approach to harmony and songwriting and we just talked about
hook pad which lets people experiment and start creating their own musical
ideas for someone who's new to hook theory and wants to dive in they're
excited about everything they've heard in this conversation what's the best
place for them to start probably the best place to start is reading about I
mean you already talked a lot about the books but you know that we have a page
where we like to talk about the books in a little more detail I like read that
and if you think it's a good fit get the first book I mean I know that sounds
silly to be they go by our product but um but yeah it's like it's pretty cheap
it's only like $14.99 and it's it's the introduction really to the whole system
that's assuming that you kind of don't know any music theory and you're this
person that you know like it's really hungry and interested in this and if you
already know a lot you can probably go straight to our theory tab area which is
like the big library of songs if you're interested in seeing like oh wow like
what's the theory of stairway to heaven but um but yeah so I yeah I think like
the books really are the best place to start I think yeah I guess we have some
blog posts too if you don't you're not quite ready to yeah fill out some money
we have we do have some stuff that kind of talks you know about some specific
concepts that you can get a get an idea for the way we talk about music well I
was just gonna say to the books or like you know we're super we we have like a
hundred percent refund policy like if somebody emails us in two years I was
like oh I bought this book two years ago and you know I didn't like it
we just here's your money back no problem yeah I mean yeah it's super low
low risk low commitment cool and I wouldn't understand how much is packed
into that first book you know I think even if you understand intellectually
what's a a one four five chord progression is it's taught in such a
different way in such a rich way I personally I found it really
just such a pleasure to read because it does give you a different perspective
even on things you think you know and book two takes that to a whole other
level and so yeah I think definitely worth checking out the contents of those
books and seeing is it something you'd like to explore more yeah I mean like on
a personal level I mean I I'm literally I think of all the things
I've done in my whole life like I think those two books being part of those is
like the thing I'm the most proud of I mean I did should we just poured
everything into those books and we think we just we really love them and I think
yeah so fantastic thank you so much it's been a real pleasure to get to talk to
you both as you know I am a huge fan of hook theory and those books and hook pad
I just think you have such a unique and valuable way of teaching some of the
most important concepts in music so thank you so much for taking the time to
join us on the musicality podcast today thanks for having us Christopher it's
gonna real pleasure yeah thanks Christopher the musicality podcast is
brought to you by musical you more musical - you know it's hard to explain
in conversation just how hook Theory works you definitely need to go take a
look for yourself but I hope this conversation has given
you some insight into where it came from what makes it different and how it could
be valuable in giving you a new insight into how music works let's recap the big
points we covered there Dave Chris and Ryan each come from quite
different musical backgrounds Ryan was musically very capable from an
early age and he experiences music with perfect pitch and synesthesia dave has
formal classical training in piano and trumpet and Chris is a mostly
self-taught guitarist for whom the music theory came much later they found a
shared passion for a particular way of teaching music theory which I would say
is characterized by two things the first is an emphasis on interpreting
notes and chords relative to the tonic ie
the key or the scale doing this means that melody notes and harmony chords can
be thought of in terms of numbers and the same patterns can be learned
recognized by ear and used in songwriting no matter what key
you're in the second notable thing is to teach theory in a very modern and
practical way not defining music theory as a set of abstract rules to be applied
but instead starting from musical examples in the songs we hear every day
and then explaining why the notes and chords in low songs work the way they do
Dave Chris and Ryan took this unique approach and they created hook theory a
website a pair of multimedia ebooks and an interactive songwriting app at its
heart hook theory is a clever interactive and animated way to
visualize what's going on in the notes and chords of songs by using a different
color for each degree of the scale along with an intuitive layout of what's
happening in pitch over time hook theory provides an innovative but very natural
way to understand music around this core technology they've built up a huge
database of modern song examples created by their enthusiastic users so that you
can explore artists or songs you like and see immediately what's going on
musically they've written to extensive books which honestly I wish had been my
theory books growing up because they provide a truly different and vastly
more interesting and useful way of approaching these topics and they've
created an interactive experimental lab of sorts with hook pad so that budding
songwriters or just those curious to play around with the theory ideas can
try things out and get explanations and assistance as you put together your own
musical creations whether you already have a good grasp of music theory or
you're just starting out and whether you want to write music yourself or just
better understand the music you hear and love
I really recommend heading to hook theory comm and exploring everything
they offer there try playing a few of their theory tab examples to see the
system in action and then maybe pick up the first hook theory book and make sure
to look out for hook pad version 2 coming very soon and bound to be packed
with even more nifty features like showing you suggested notes to use for
melodies and offering you the magic cord to put next in your own songs thanks for
listening to this episode and if you are wondering why hook theory is called hook
theory stay tuned for our next episode where we'll be talking about what
exactly a hook in music is thank you for listening to the musicality podcast this
episode has ended but your musical journey continues head over to
musicality podcast calm where you will find the links and resources mentioned
in this episode as well as bonus content exclusive for podcast listeners that's
musicality put
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