Episode 100: Modern Day Music Theory with Ryan Miyakawa

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Ryan Miyakawa is Hooktheory’s resident music theory aficionado and programs the brains behind Hookpad’s playback, music theory, and artificial intelligence engines. 

He’s a classically trained pianist, and loves deconstructing popular music to understand the elements of a great song. Ryan has a PhD in engineering from UC Berkeley and is delighted to combine his passions of science and music to help others create music.

Here’s what you’ll learn about: 

  • How to take your song writing to the next level using Hooktheory’s tools

  • Ways to take advantage of today’s popular chord progressions 

  • Techniques for building and releasing tension in your songs

Ryan Miyakawa:
How many movies have been set in New York, but they're not all the same. And I think it's important for us to really understand that there's so much creativity in music and having a template for what chords might sound good that's not hindering your creativity, that could actually enhance your creativity.

Michael Walker:
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Michael Walker:
All right. I'm excited to be here today with Ryan Miyakawa. Ryan's the co-founder of Hooktheory, which is an online platform that teaches music theory for songwriting and music production. Himself is a lifelong pianist, composer, educator, and overall music theory geek. And he created Hooktheory in 2012, to make elements of music theory more fun and accessible to the average musician. In the past 10 years, since Hooktheory's grown into a community of over 250,000 songwriters, producers, music enthusiasts, who come to the platform to learn how to improve their songwriting, how to practice their ear training, and really how to digest a massive amount of data that's compiled from chord progressions and melody data and analysis of over 30,000 hit songs.

Michael Walker:
And so today, I'm super excited to talk with Ryan about the modern day music theory implementation based on the fact that there's so many amazing tools and opportunities that are happening right now for independent musicians with the internet and with software and with AI. And so the landscape's changing so quickly in terms of how you can leverage these tools to be able to level up as a creator and yeah, something I'm super excited you got about. So all Ryan, I know that was a long intro, but thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Thanks so much for having me, Michael.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. You got it. All right. So to start out, I would love to hear a little bit about your story and how you got started and discovered Hooktheory and how you made it to where you are today.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Cool. Yeah. So, yeah, as you mentioned, I'm a pianist. I started piano pretty early and I think I started in the way that a lot of people start piano. So I was doing these Yamaha group classes and I had a teacher that would teach me the standard Mozart, Beethoven, and I liked it. I would consider myself an average pianist. I was never one of those prodigies, but what really sparked the fire in me as a musician was just listening to the radio and hearing songs that just moved me. They would do something I'd be like, "Man, that makes me feel so good. What is this magic?" And I listened to a lot of these early '90s, R&B artists like Mariah Carey, who would have these hit songs. And I just loved it. I'd put the CD on and I'd go to my piano and I'd try to plunk out what are these chords that she's doing.

Ryan Miyakawa:
What is she singing? And can I create music like that? So, yeah, fast forward to college and I've put aside my piano career, but in the process, I had learned quite a bit of music theory. And if you play piano classically, that's just something that a lot of teachers do. And I could look at like Beethoven piece and tell you, "Oh, this is this chord and that chord." But I didn't honestly didn't really know why that was important other than it was just part of the curriculum and I could take a test and answer the questions and things like that. But something clicked for me in college where I was like, "Wait a minute, this chord that Beethoven did, that's what Green Day is doing." It's not like these are two different spheres of music, this is one music.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And I think that's when I started really geeking out to, I would listen to a song and I'm 19 or 20 now and I hear a song that really moves me. And I was like, "You know what? I know what's going on now, it's this." And I think that's where this all started. I didn't go to school for music. I went to school for engineering and I was a math and science guy. And I ended up going to grad school and one of my really good buddies in the program, he's a guitarist. And I think that his experience as a guitarist was similar to maybe some of your listeners, which is that he never had a teacher. He just picked up the guitar in college because he wanted to strum along with his friends and he got to be pretty, pretty decent, but he's strumming chords one day.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And he's like, "Man, I wish I could know what chord came next." And I would say, "Oh, why don't you try a B minor?" And he would play it and be like, "Man, that's exactly what I was looking for. How did you know that?" And I'm like, "It's actually not that complicated. I know it seems like it's complicated, but it's not. I just took some music theory." And he's like, "Music theory? I tried to learn that online, but it was just talking to me about Bach and I turned it off." And I was like, "Yeah, you just got to get past that and then you can learn some of it. It's really not that complicated." And so he and I talked about it for a few years and we should try to distill the elements of music theory that are interesting to people like me, a guitarist, and see if we can teach that.

Ryan Miyakawa:
What we ended up doing at... We went to school at UC Berkeley and they have this program where students can teach a course on anything, on Scrabble, the Simpsons, Fortnite, and you just sign up, you get a sponsor and you do it. So we're like, "Let's teach a course," and we've never taught a course like this before, but we just thought we should do it, on practical music theory for songwriting. And so we get this course together. It's 40 freshmen and sophomores in college. Most of them just amateur guitarists. And we just made a curriculum where we just taught just not all of music theory, but just the parts that give you these little clues and how to make it chord progression, how do you make a melody that sounds good over your chord progression. And then for the final project, we all just had a concert and it was great. We had such a good time and got a really good reception and this story's going a little long. I'm going to get to the Hooktheory part here.

Michael Walker:
This is awesome. Yeah, no, what I love about the discovery of what you're talking about right now is about this idea of what you're describing as I think there's so many of us as musicians, probably a lot of people are listening to this right now who they've might be dabbled in music theory. And they've thought, man, I wish I understood how this works in a way that's actually practical that actually I can use in my songwriting. And it's not necessarily you need to understand everything, but actually having it in a way that's practical that can help inform their songwriting is awesome. So we're definitely going to get into that, but I would love to hear the rest of your story.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. Yeah. When we taught this class, we needed some material. We couldn't just get up there and just wing it for a semester. So we wrote up a loose, I wouldn't even call it a textbook. It was more just some blog posts on some topics. And in our graduate program, we did a lot of coding because we're scientists and engineers. So we coded up a very rudimentary system where you could enter in notes and chords and you didn't need to read sheet music. That was important for us because my buddy, Chris, who's the guitarist, he never learned to read sheet music. And I think a lot of musicians, if you didn't play violin or trumpet or piano, you don't need to learn sheet music. And maybe you read a tab or maybe you just know some chords.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And so we developed this system that's like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, there's notes and chords, but no sheet music. And so we developed this software system where people could enter it in and then we needed examples for how did the Beatles do it? How did Led Zeppelin do it? And so we would sync our notation with these YouTube videos. And that was, I think, a really key part of the course, because we wanted to teach the theory, not from Bach or Beethoven or Chopin, which is how it's classically taught. We wanted to teach it with songs that people actually were into because we thought that was really the missing part because a lot of people we've heard now from many of our users that they look onto these music theory blogs, but it just doesn't feel like it speaks to them.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And we really wanted it and we thought the missing part really was music that people cared of. So when the class was done, we had all this material. We had our little book and we had this software where people enter notation. So we're like, "Let's just put this online to the public and see what happens." And so we did. And what ended up happening was that people were interested in actually analyzing other music and we'd analyzed maybe 50 to a hundred songs for this class, but we put it online. It's like Wikipedia. You can go and anybody can edit it. Anybody can create something. And what ended up happening was people got really into it. We built this community of people who were just really into, yeah, this is my favorite song. I want to share how it works. And so they'd go and they'd analyze it.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And that was a birth of what we call the TheoryTab Database. It's like a guitar tab, but it's for music theory because it's showing not just the chords, but how the chords function in a key is this what we would call the one chord, which is the home chord of the key. And yeah, it didn't explode overnight, but it's been 10 years now and we're at over 30,000 analyses all created by our community. And it's just been amazing for us to see this. And so this is a free resource that we still host that anybody can go onto the site, browse analyses, or create their own. And also this software that we use to write these analyses or to write music is also online. It's called Hookpad and that's how Hooktheory began. It was a book and some software and this Wiki and we're still doing it today.

Michael Walker:
That's so cool. Yeah. What an awesome idea for a platform, right? To really take this music and break it down in a way that's scientific, but also is accessible. And it's based on, like you said, music that people actually are listening to, that's popular that people care about right now. And I would love where my brain goes to immediately is the use case of having all of this data analyzed and potentially incorporating a machine learning model or AI and maybe just more so what are the patterns that now that you have these analyses, are they standardized in a way where you can look at all that data and start to uncover some of those patterns of... Yeah. Most people are listening this right now have probably heard of the four chord, the magic chords that are at every hit song is awesome, but it seems like there are... In those four chords, they come and gone and they have been in part of pop music for a little while, but there probably are different waves and trends and things that have come in and out.

Michael Walker:
So I'm curious on your perspective now having built this platform and analyzed all of these songs, what are some of the notes that you have in terms of patterns that you've recognized and how that might apply moving forward?

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. One of the great things about having this giant database of song analyses is precisely that we can take a look at it and ask these questions, what's popular now? Was that always popular? If not, what was popular back then? And it's amazing because my whole life, I mentioned that I've been thinking critically about chord progressions. When I hear songs, it's hard for me not to ask myself what is going on.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And so I felt like I had good insight into what the trends are. But when you actually look at the data, it's amazing that all these little cool patterns and stories pop up as you mentioned, this Axis of Awesome, what we would call 1, 5, 6, 4, for these songs is it's almost cliche that so many songs have used it. But what was really interesting for me is that while it's true that those four chords on their own are by far the most popular chords in popular music, the order of that chord of those chords has actually evolved. And if you look back to the '50s or the '60s, it was actually 1, 6, 4, 5. If your listeners know Heart and Soul-

Michael Walker:
Oh, you said it was one-

Ryan Miyakawa:
Six, the A minor, F, and then G. Yeah, yeah. That was really the engine that power it... Exactly. Yeah. Many of you might know that song in Greece, those magic changes. Those were the magic changes before the Axis of Awesome. And it turns out that that was really the progression before in the '50s, '60s. And actually even songs today still use this. And really the 1, 5, 6, 4 didn't come about until more '70s and '80s really is when it started taking off.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And now we're seeing even new iterations of this in the 2000s and the 2010s, we've seen this move toward a lot of electronic bass tracks. So even the pop music has a lot more synthy feel. And many of these start with a minor chord. Now, whether you call this C major or A minor, that's up for discussion later, but just bear with me while I talk about these four chords with the A minor being the start. And if you just take that 1, 5, 6, 4, and you start on the six first, you get 6, 4, 1, 5, and this was a wildly popular progression in the 2000s. And now in the 2010s, we're seeing things like 6, 5, 4, 1. Anyway, there's a lot of data obviously and it's really interesting to look at, but I think you're touching on one of the cool things.

Michael Walker:
Sorry. As you're talking through, I just want to geek out, but that's what you're talking about in the 2000s.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
(singing).

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. And I think just talking a little bit about the Axis of Awesome, I think that some listeners might take away a message from this idea that, oh, so many songs used this chord progression to mean that there is no creativity by using a progression that has been used before. And I want to push back against that notion because if it was true that all songs that used a single progression sounded the same, then there wouldn't be so many hits over so many decades. And I think it's important we get a lot of songwriters that come to Hooktheory that are just a little lost when it comes to chord.

Ryan Miyakawa:
They want to put themselves in their songs, but they don't want to copy somebody else. They don't want to be like, "Oh, you just used the blah, blah blah, from this song." And my experience is there is so much that goes into a song that you should think about a chord progression. It's just one of the scenes of your motion picture. How many movies have been set in New York? But they're not all the same. And I think it's important for us to really understand that there's so much creativity in music and having a template for what chords might sound good is that's not hindering your creativity, that could actually enhance your creativity.

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Michael Walker:
A hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. Especially with something like a chord progression where there's not that many chord progressions that you can choose from where it's like let's count the backbone and heck the first thought I hear is when you say there's these patterns, you can see what's the new chord progression sort of the movement. One thing that comes to mind is it seems like at least there was this phase where now is (singing) and that was a progression. I'm not sure if that's still the patterns-

Ryan Miyakawa:
That's in the top 40 right now for sure.

Michael Walker:
Okay. Interesting.

Ryan Miyakawa:
By the way, that sequence of chords was one of the first ones that I fell in love with. So back in the '90s, a lot of rappers would use these backing tracks that just used similar progressions. And I couldn't get enough of it. I was just like, "Oh man, this is amazing."

Michael Walker:
I love that progression too. Yeah. There's something about that buildup. In a lot of our Paradise Fear songs, that buildup progression was where some real stuff started to come out. It was the parts that resonates. There's an underlying current that goes through it that makes those chords so magical.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. So out of curiosity, now that you have this data, and I'm sure it's increasing all the time because of this awesome user generated community and content where people are doing these analyses together, what are some of the chords progressions? I know we've touched into a few of them, but right now, are you able to predict that we're actually moving towards this progression right now? And can people use that in a way that commercially they can think, you know what, I'm actually going to start with this foundation with these chord progression and write over it? What are your thoughts around that?

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah, no, I wish I could predict the next hit song, but I can speak a little to what I would call at least for me is exciting new trends. So I think that not just with chords, chords, melody, lyrics, rhythm, all aspects of the songwriting, I think that one of the key tenets that underpins all of this is this idea of building tension. Tension is a really important concept in music because good songs build tension and then they release tension. And that's what gives listeners this feeling of, ah, yeah. And I think it's easier to see why that's the case and say an EDM track where you have this giant build and you're just like, "Ah, I'm missing something." And then you drop and you're like, "That's what I was missing. Yes. I feel it." But that type of tension, you can build up in a lot of ways.

Ryan Miyakawa:
And just to give an example in chord progressions, there are techniques that we talk about sometimes at Hooktheory where you can build tension with dissonance say. So you can make it a chord that on its own, you're like, "Ah, I don't know how I feel about that chord." But then if you follow it by one where that dissonance is released, that can give listeners this, "Ah, that's what I'm missing." And one cool trend that I think I first heard and they may not be the first group that did this, but I first heard this in a Chainsmokers song where if you take that same progression we're working with, so you start with an A minor, when you go to the G what they do is they add the fourth of the chord. So it's like a G chord, G, B, D, but you've added the C also.

Ryan Miyakawa:
So you hear this. This is a G, B, and then the C, and that B and the C they clash, it grates. And now on its own, you might be like, "Oh, why would you use that chord?" But if you play A minor and then you play that G chord with that C added, and then you go to the F, the resolution of that tension feels so good. And after they did this... So people have used the G chord with the C, but not the Bs. We call that a sus, but having them both together was something I was like, "That's cool." And since then, I've heard probably eight or nine tracks with that same pattern and I like it. It's like a chord progression innovation, chord innovation. It's not like dissonance is a new idea, but I love that people are continuing to innovate with chords.

Michael Walker:
That's a great example. Yeah. And there's something about that note in there that has some of that tension, it builds that tension. Also, just an interesting theory of music and life and jazz stories and how you can't tell a good story without tension. If everything was always perfect, it's okay, that's just boring. In a similar way, like our lives, we need a goal or we need something that moves us or challenge. That's riding a bike where you got to be moving towards something. But there is a movement, there's dissonance that doesn't sit. There's something inside of you like I want to resolve.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this is something that there's a lot of our users express this idea, people up and coming in songwriting express this idea that chords are... It's like a necessary ingredient, but I don't give it much thought. So I put it there. And then where I specialize in is the story and telling with my lyrics in the audio mixing and all of that stuff is great and super important. But I think that what we've learned by looking at all of this data is that there's also nuance in your chord progressions. And no matter what level you are of a songwriter, if you're a super beginner or you're very seasoned, thinking about these aspects can just add another dimension to your songwriting.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, no, it's great. And of all things that influence the overall vibe and feel of a song, it seems like chord progression's probably right at the root of it. There's hardly anything else you could change with the song that would make as big of an impact on the overall feel and the vibe of it then the chord progression itself.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. And I'm not trying to plug the songwriting software on our site, our Hookpad is free to use. We do charge for some aspects of it, but anyone is welcome to use it for free. You can go over and write chords and melody and save projects and things like that. But that's one of the things that we wanted to give people is when you're writing the song, have a way to basically sketch out a chord progression and to quickly substitute other chords or try variations of chords to get an idea of where you're going without having to lay down the whole track and logic first. And we found that at least among our users, it's like your scratch pad. It's like an interactive scratch pad where you can get ideas down. And for many people found that are struggling with we call it writer's blocker or maybe you're stuck on a section of a song, this can be a really good way to get ideas out. And I found in my own songwriting that that's very helpful for me.

Michael Walker:
Wow. I love that. That's so cool of an idea for a software platform that you can help you sketch out the chord regressions like that. And I'm just even thinking if you have access to all of this analysis of songwriting and in some of the most popular songs in the world and just different progressions and progression changes, then you could even suggest ideas for people. If they're writing their song and they've gotten to the bridge of the song and they're experiencing writer's block, where can I go to next? Here, let us analyze and choose four different options for you that you can listen through and be like which one fits what your vibe in. And so it sounds like that's something that's built into the platform right now.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. Yeah. What we can do is you can go and write some chords. We have this feature called magic chord, but essentially what it's doing is if you feel like you need a hand, you need a suggestion or you just want to look at what have other people done in my situation here, you can essentially click a button. It looks through the database and it finds examples of people or songs that have used similar chord progressions so far. And then it can suggest a follow-up. And this is something that we've gone back and forth on a lot, because I think no songwriter wants a computer to write their song for them because the art is in the agency of the artist to make these decisions. I think it's going to be... We're talking about the future.

Ryan Miyakawa:
We're going to get to a point where I think a computer is very soon is going to be able to write fairly convincing, popular music. People always say, "Oh no, is this the end of songwriting?" But I think it's important to remember that part of appreciating art is the art is as much the artist as it is the final product. And I think that will never be taken away from us. And we're trying to balance the line of we want a tool that makes music theory less of an obstacle, but we don't want to steal the creative process.

Ryan Miyakawa:
So it's balancing this line where it's like you have a tool built. You have a better set of tools. You have a better drill and a better wrench, but you don't have the finished product on a platter for you. And that's something that, as we are still developing Hooktheory, we're trying to figure out what's the best direction because we're also all artists and creators and we love the creative process. And we want to share that with as much people without making it feel like it's canned or something like that. But it's something we're still discovering for sure.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. I love this conversation so much. It's so interesting because AI and this type of technology is really revolutionizing a lot of different creative industries. There's copywriting tools where you can type in a few prompts and this AI is literally just going to write your email copy and write stuff for you and started exploring it. I'm like, "This is pretty dang good." They do a pretty good job. And it's really helpful for getting a jump from it's not perfect yet, but it's probably not going to be that long until it reaches a point where it actually is going to be able to articulate just as well, if not even more intelligently than we can as humans. So that's both really exciting and also terrifying, I think, for a lot of people is that-

Ryan Miyakawa:
Absolutely. Such a crazy time to be alive. Yeah. As you mentioned, we also use this copywriting AI. There's a new one. Yeah. There's this image based one called Dolly that just came out. You say paint me a picture of flying pigs with the rainbow waterfall and out pops this beautiful render completely computer generated. As you mentioned, it's crazy and exciting, but also there's a lot of unknowns. How are we going to use this technology in ways that preserves our sense of being?

Michael Walker:
One thing too that the people who are here right now, us and everyone who's listening to this right now are in this world where essentially we have a tool like AI to be able to generate our ideas and turn them very quickly into reality. I think it really serves the creators, right?

Michael Walker:
If you're a creator, what does it mean to be a creator? It means you generate ideas. You're tapped into the flow of imagination and you create things in your mind. And then you somehow turn those mind creations into reality. And it seems like the tool that you've built and the artificial intelligence that we're moving towards really it's not necessarily going to say you can't imagine things, but it's going to remove the barrier between what you can imagine. And then just instantly you'll be able to realize the fruit of your thoughts. So at least that's what I tell myself to sleep at night as the AI slowly approaches to take over all humanity.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think it's good because if we think of AI as a tool, my hope is ultimately that it's going to democratize a lot of the elements of creating art. I think that even 20 years ago, if you didn't have a super expensive studio and setup and super expensive computer and all these cards, it was very hard for you to produce a track that sounded professional. But these days, with all this technology, it's-

Michael Walker:
And samples.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. It's so much easier for somebody who's just really passionate, but may not have the means to do so otherwise to get their feet wet and to really start creating. And I think that as all of us creators know, sometimes just sitting down and putting your fingers on the keys, that's what it takes. There's been so many days where I might not have sat down at the piano. I might have done something else, but I just happened to, and something came out that was like, man, I can't believe that today could have happened without me thinking of that. And I think that the more tools that we have to just get people excited, the better it's going to be for all of us.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. It's super cool, really exciting time and who even knows in the next 50 years looking back? 50 years ago, looking at where we are now, I think a lot of the stuff that we have would just look like magic, right? There's some quote that something about technology, when technology is sufficiently advanced enough, then it appears just like magic to anyone else.

Michael Walker:
And certainly it was the case with radio waves and with the internet, if you go back far enough, it would literally just be pure magic. And I'm not sure if you're up to date on neural link and some of brain interfaces, but that's a rabbit hole that we could get down for a little bit. But that's probably not that far from now, we'll be in a world where we can literally just control our devices with our thoughts and maybe be able to communicate with each other telepathically just with thoughts directly probably would be a lot less miscommunication and misinterpretation if we're able to directly communicate on this level. But man, the fact that we can even be talking about this in our lifetimes this might happen is pretty insane.

Ryan Miyakawa:
I know, crazy world.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, man. I would love to connect with you more too about maybe being able to integrate with. Right now, we're developing what we're calling the Music Relic Marketplace, which is marketplace for musicians to create additions of their songs and their albums and turn them into [inaudible 00:30:25] but in an environmentally friendly way. And part of that platforms is I would love to make the music itself really, I don't know, digitized so that we have the metadata and all the songs and that we can analyze the chord progressions of all the songs. We can see, here's the ones that are trending right now, the ones that are most popular. I mean, there might be some sort of integration there with Hooktheory with your guys' tool to be able to build in some cool networking there.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, speaking a little bit back to the AI. So right now, all of the music on the TheoryTab Database is hand analyzed by our community. But you can imagine a world where a computer takes a jumpstart at that. So it can do it by itself or maybe it does the first-

Michael Walker:
Suggested. Yeah. It suggested tags and the human piece can come in and approve or play around with them.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. I think that perhaps we're not far off from a machine model that could possibly do that. And I think that would be a great thing because then-

Michael Walker:
And I don't have anything as humans too, if we start with billion too, the existing model, and then you having that backbone of having analyzed those songs and having that structure is probably that's exactly what a machine learning model needs in order to start to predict it.

Ryan Miyakawa:
But yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of music. We have several examples of music on our site that's it's not a famous pop song. This is actually user written songs that they've shared with the community and it's really exciting to see that. I love listening to songs that people have written.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. It would be super interesting to hear just in terms of the... I'm not sure if this is one thing that you include in the metadata, but just the streams or the popularity of the songs or being able to map that as well as the progressions and everything. It sounds like that's probably what you're already doing, how you can keep your fingers on the pulse of what are the progressions that are really starting to take off right now. But being able to map that out to almost like the cultural [inaudible 00:32:23], as a world right now, what is the progressions, what's the movements that are really resonating because would be super fascinating.

Michael Walker:
But hey man, let's get ready to wrap up. This is great. I could totally go down the rabbit hole and geek out on this stuff for 10 hours, but I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on here and be able to share this amazing tool that you've developed. And for anyone who's listening or watching this right now who'd like to dive deeper or learn more about it, where's the best place for them to go to dig deeper?

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah, you can go to hooktheory.com and there you can find a lot of free resources like the TheoryTab Database and our songwriting sketch pad Hookpad. And we also released a chord progression ear trainer called Chord Crush that you could check out as well.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Personally, I'm excited to go and geek out on all these different tools. Awesome. Awesome. Hey, man, thanks again. I really appreciate you popping on here and looking forward to staying in touch.

Ryan Miyakawa:
Yeah. Thanks a lot, Michael.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about the guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level. It's time to be a modern musicians now and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.