Digital piracy is a reality. So are honest consumers.

“I think there are more honest consumers than those who want something for nothing.” ~ Duke Sharp

If you would like to donate that’s cool! Pay only what you can afford… here’s the author’s side of the offer.

Garage Band Theory is the culmination of over ten years of hard work, distilling my experience of thousands of hours of practice, performance and lessons into a useful tool for students and teachers alike. Out-of-pocket expenses include fees to editors, proofreaders, music teachers, an indexer, cover designer and photographer, graphic artists, web developers and consultants, as well as software, hardware, etc.

After spending more than a decade writing this book and turning it into a product I’m proud to bring to the market, I find I am in complete disagreement with the pervasive belief that a digital book is somehow ‘worth less’ than a paper version.

I think everyone would agree that the value of any book is in the ideas it contains, not the medium on which it is presented. About 90% of the expenses are exactly the same for both, and are incurred before printing a paper book or hiring a web developer to make it available digitally.

DRM is an annoying, insulting nuisance for honest consumers and a very minor inconvenience to dedicated file-sharers. For these and other reasons I will not use DRM on the PDF version of Garage Band Theory. I believe that if you’ve purchased the download you should be able to use it on any of your computers, and loan it to your friends.

Loaning a digital book to friends and family is your right when you’ve purchased it, just like you do with a paper book. I am sincerely honored when anyone thinks enough of GBT to want to share it, and I encourage you to do so. The difference is that when you ‘loan’ a digital copy, it is never ‘returned.’

GBT is not a novel you’ll read once and never look at again — it’s a resource you’ll find valuable for years to come.

If you share this book with someone who likes it and wants to use it, I believe it’s fair for me to ask that they make a donation. I hope you’ll mention that if you share GBT.

Please consider my time and expenses when you decide whether to compensate me for the download. I am not a corporate publisher or a major record label. I’m a musician and an author offering his wares for a fair price, not unlike the potter, weaver or painter at the crafts fair.

If you know someone who could really use GBT and they honestly can’t afford to pay for it, feel free to share it, no strings attached.

If you purchase the download from this website within one year and later decide you want the book too, I’ll deduct $10 from the retail price.

Please, do keep in mind that this book was designed to sit on a music stand, on the kitchen table or in your lap, and it won’t work quite as well on most computers unless you can see two pages at once. It’s OK on the screen, but there are a lot of places where you’ll want to see the writing on the left-hand page at the same time as the example that’s on the right-hand page.

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!