Doc Phonic

As a music production teacher, I have always tried to teach my students a healthy balance of both music skills and concepts as well as production skills and concepts.  I believe four important things about CREATING music: 

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1. Anyone can make music.  

2. The fastest way to get better at making music is to Make More Music.

3. You do not need to know ABOUT music in order to MAKE music.

4. You  definitely do not need to be able to READ music in order to MAKE music.

However, it can certainly be HELPFUL to know some things about music and be able to read music.  One of the best things I believe can be helpful to know when making music is some basic music theory.  But the term music theory tends to conjure up feelings of staleness and is often associated with textbooks and school.  For this reason, I refer to the most basic aspects of music theory as Music Facts.  

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Music Facts are things like the names of the notes on a piano keyboard, intervals, chords, scales, and the vocabulary of rhythm.  Music Facts are useful only if they are immediately available in the mind, the same way math facts like 7+3 = 10 and 4*5 = 20 are useful.  They allow us to do more complex things more quickly and with less mental effort.  To be useful, Music Facts must be memorized and take almost no mental effort to recall.  But getting to that level of memorization takes practice.  This is why I developed musicfacts.app.  MusicFacts.app is an ongoing project of mine that allows me to more easily have my students practice and quiz these basic music facts so that they can learn them well enough so as to be actually useful.