Garage Band Theory – Background

Garage Band Theory is a new approach to music theory and is written for all instruments. It’s a great place for beginners to start, but deep enough to be a great resource for experienced players.

Playing music in and around Montana has been my main occupation for over 30 years. I was teaching private lessons when I started developing GBT approach. I was often frustrated by the fact that most students, beginners and advanced alike, did not have enough musical vocabulary to articulate their questions.

In fact, that’s true of most of the working musicians I’ve known. They play great, but don’t know the names of anything except maybe a handful of basic chords. They can talk all day about instruments, amps, effects, gigs… while basic musical terms like “it’s a 1-6-2-5 progression’ and ‘C minor seven flat five’ are complete mysteries!

This is easy stuff, and useful too. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, vocabulary is what enables coherent thought and conversation and most musicians are weak when it comes to musical vocabulary.

One of the questions I was asked most often was “How do you hear a song one time and play it right back… by ear?”

GBT is the only book that explains and illuminates the mysterious process of playing by ear by using practical, useful music theory. There’s now a way to meet in the middle. The good news is that it is coming very soon on Amazon.com!