TME Tuesday - Speaking About Theory

Wow. I was wondering what to write about today for TME Tuesday, and along came this post off the Music Therapists Unite group on Facebook. Kimberly Werner posted the following:
Dorian MusicTherapy Campbell, could this be what you were referring to some time back? https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab

Such an innocuous little post, but there it was, a website dedicated to tabs and sheet music that thinks like I think! Huzzah!!

I don't play the piano. I have never claimed to do so. At best, I am a very good functional pianist who can fake it and play by ear, but I rarely can play an accompaniment in my left hand and an independent melody in my right hand. This effect is a combination of my own difficulties with being EXTREMELY left handed and a lousy program for class piano that really didn't teach me how to play the piano, but did show me how to do mirror scales. Anyway, it has always made sense for me to think of music in theory chords rather than in specific key signatures.

I've looked at this site, and I think it will become one of my favorites.

I signed up for the community - so far, no charge - and have looked around. There is a dictation challenge to help out with ear training, and links to charts that offer the music in chord format, tabulature, original keys, color-coding, you name it. In addition, you can speed things up or slow things down within the learning part of the site. The melody is notated using color and shape lengths - there are smaller note lengths for shorter notes and longer for longer notes - very good for visual learners like me. It also has a link to the YouTube video (that might be a problem if I ever use this with clients rather for my own musical development...), but it allows you to use a piano version rather than the YouTube version as well. The last feature that I really like is the loop function. The loop allows you to listen to and play along with the phrase until you have the chords well-practiced.

Basically, the site takes you through the basic chord progression of the indicated song and that's it. It doesn't take up more space than necessary, so, if you want to use the entire song, you have to find the sheet music or the tabs or learn all of the words. The site does give you enough of the music to figure out how to play the song. For example, the arrangement of Happy by Pharrell Williams includes the Intro, the verse, and the chorus. I am looking forward to playing around more with this. I may even download the HookTheory software. We will see how much it costs...   


https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab

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