I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
Over the years I have run a few A/B tests on the landing page. I tried some variations I thought MUST improve the conversion rate. However, this one, which is basically the original one, is still the best performer.
Another plus for your landing page. It’s amazing how many landing pages vomit features the developer is excited about but never explain why I need their product.
I clicked through to the website after your comment. Landing pages are too often a wall of text, this one is a great example of how they can be done correctly.
Yeah, this is one of the most compelling landing pages I've ever clicked on. Actually dropping me straight into the first lesson before I hit the paywall is very effective.
I'm impressed! Every couple of years I come across a different music theory website and I try to follow along, but inevitably after a few sentences I'm completely lost and the rest becomes incomprehensible.
I got really far along in yours, which was great, until I got to 6 (Keys): "When a song says that it is in the key of C Major or D Minor this is simply telling you which of the 12 notes are used in this song." You then give examples of Major and Minor keys, each of which contains seven notes. This threw me for a loop. Are you saying every song consists of exactly seven notes (some repeated, obviously) from only one key? Or are you saying every song uses at least some notes from a key? Also, don't some songs switch keys in the middle?
Not looking for answers here, just wanted to point out where I got stuck so maybe you can add some clarity to that section.
You have to understand that music theory is not a set of rules to follow, its a set of ideas that sound good to western ears and therefore are very commonly found in most music.
Not every song, but much western music, especially pop music and nursary rhymes, will stick to the same major or minor scale of notes for the whole song. Going outside of this scale is quite normal too and changing the scale/key multiple times in a song is also quite common.
The point of learning music theory is to give you a toolbox so that you can both recognise patterns in music you are listening to, as well as give you some ideas of what sounds good when you compose or improvise.
This is quite similar to mathematics where in school we dogmatically teach students how to do arithmetic in the base-10 euclidean system, because having deep fluency in one system is more useful than having a little understanding of many systems.
I certainly understand that in any system (not just music), some rules can be broken at certain times for various reasons (safety, aesthetics, etc.). To combine what you're saying with what I was saying, I would like to see, at least in this case, a better explanation of what exceptions are commonly made to these rules (e.g. using non-standard chords) and when they are made (e.g. in music from region XYZ).
In fact, I'd argue that such explanations are critical even when you're learning any kind of theory since it tells you when the theory breaks down, whether that's because it simply doesn't fit the task, because people like to get creative, etc.
You've missed my first point. It's not rules. There are no rules to break. The "broken rules" simply describes systems within music that you haven't been introduced to yet. For example, major and minor are also called "ionean" and "aeolean" "modes" respectively, and these sit within a set of 8 modes. There are also blues and jazz scales, names for music that break out of standard tuning. There is a style called "12 tone" (of which an example is Also Sprach Zarathustra) which uses deliberate dissonance.
You simply aren't up to that part yet, because classical western music training teaches the more common ideas which are in music that the punters listen to first. (Mainly because people generally need a few years playing music before they develope a taste for these things anyway)
I am aware you didn't specifically ask for answer, but I was not satisfied with the answers you got :-), so I'll add my two cents.. I have 3 points to make.
(1) The first is about 'when does it make sense for a song to use more than 7 notes?'
WHEN we do this, we will often say "this song uses a key change".
Some keys have partial overlap - note-sequences they share, and ranges where they differ.
One elegant way to exploit this, is to let the song meander into the common range of the two keys, and then meander OUT of that range into a different key that we used to get IN to that range.
This can produce a cool surprise effect, a bit like looking at those optical illusion pictures that you can look at two ways. A similar trick can be used with rhythms that overlap, instead of frequencies that overlap.
(2) Where does the "rule" of 7 come from, ie what shapes it:
As you know, notes have harmonic friends that they resonate well with.
So when you are picking a 'colour palette' of notes that go well together, you will of course often pick such 'friends'. However, the more notes you already have in your picked pool, the harder it gets to add another note, that will still mesh nicely with all those previous choices. Your remaining choices will be more and more likely to clash; in particular it will be more and more likely to be "close" to one of your existing choices. And close notes clash. So, on a 12-note scale, 7 is about the optimal number of tones you can pick without them clashing too much. It is just a convention however, so some stubborn individual might come up with an 8-note scale. Once you start with 8 notes, you would be tempted to employ extra "OK I have 8 notes, but I try to avoid playing THOSE TWO back to back"-rules.
Then again, I often hear my 10-year old loudly playing .. sounds(music?) from tiktok and its ilk,
and as an old geezer, I am starting to think that some of our youngsters have given up on scales altogether..
I have no idea what my third point was, at this point.
The sentence you quoted is a decent simplification but you probably shouldn’t take it too literally. It’s not really that the melody uses exactly seven notes. It is that these seven notes form the harmonic context that the chords and melody sits in. Normally that also means that the notes in question will be the most common ones in both chords and melody, but you can certainly use other notes as well.
A key is really an “I know it when I hear it” thing. The notes used are just one of many clues working together.
Taking a look. For the past two years I've been thinking about drawing. Why it's difficult, how its possible for people like Kim Jung Gi to draw from their imagination. My theory is that it's a learned thing (as opposed to innate ability), but that it's not taught from primitives well. For example, rotating a cube is something that you cannot really find an explanation for. I think the actual difficulty in drawing (representational-ly) boils down to preserving the identity of objects through rotation. This difficulty is preserved in the presence of perspective or not (orthographic projection).
Drawabox is based on doing exercises to improve your mark making (the accuracy of the marks you draw on the page) and eventually leads to you drawing hundreds of boxes in perspective as a consistent exercise. A lot of people swear by it. I enjoyed the first week of it but decided that drawing is not a priority right now.
Forget it. There's very little that can be taught about drawing.
Drawing from model is about being the kind of character that enjoys spending hours tweaking at tiny details and measuring measuring measuring. Anybody willing to sit 3 hours in front of the model every day can learn it, if he understands that he must measure.
Drawing from imagination like Kim Jung Gi on the other hand is about doing that every day most of the day since you were a little kid, and you probably need an innate ability to boot (and that might be some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder / autism...).
Yeah, I'm not referring to drawing which is copying.
> There's very little that can be taught about drawing.
While drawing from the imagination is largely about using the intuition. The intuition can be trained just like the more analytical side of the brain. I can teach you a few properties of rotation/space, etc, and then give you the right exercises, and then you won't need to use construction to draw.
KJG does have some innate ability, and he was clearly obsessed, but it's not actually the bulk of his method. He has a video about drawing scissors. He can articulate nearly everything he is drawing, specifically the function which guides the design. There are others who can draw like him. Look up Tom Fox.
I've been building something in a similar space over at https://muted.io/. It's been just about paying out my rent and food in the past year.
I've been pretty impressed at Lightnote and how its executed and actually tried to reach out to the creator a couple of times for potential collaborations. Not sure if my messages made it through.
You site is insane! I clicked the keyboard as a lark and it totally got me intrigued about the entire rest of the site. I was smiling as I read the explainations.
The landing page is what I built over the winter break, including those first 7 lessons. Since then that page has remained largely unchanged.
However, when it started getting a lot of traffic I added a pre-order form for a full course. THAT took me 6 months to code up all the additional lessons. Building all the interactive pieces (drum synths for rhythm lessons, an ear training game for intervals, a virtual guitar, etc.) was really fun but a lot of work. For example, the interactive guitar uses samples I recorded note-by-note from my acoustic guitar in my bedroom. Afterwards I couldn't look at it for months. And then over the years I've added more.
Would love it if you could go into more detail about those two weeks. Had you already played around with tone.js beforehand? Did you have an idea or a draft written up for that initial lesson so you knew what was gonna be in it, and was it your initial vision to have a picture of each waveform accompanied by the sound, and buttons for each note in the scale? Did you have to change part of your design (even small details) when you discovered that it was hard to build something a certain way and that another way would be easier?
Related thought - Is there a good way to search for projects like this? I know there are hundreds of these passion projects that never show up in google.
Ex) This year I want to get better at playing piano. Reddit and google bring up a few consistent big name links. I'd love to support a well-produced course by a creator like this, but have no idea how to find it.
I sent you an email in Feb 2023 about a video that wouldn't load. I'm not sure whether you saw it, as I didn't see a reply:
One of the embedded videos on the progressions page is no longer available on YouTube. I'm not sure whether you're still maintaining lightnote, but thought I'd let you know anyway :)
I’m a customer and it’s awesome. I think we’ve even exchanged emails about some questions I’ve had. When I paid for the premium version I thought it was super good for what I was getting. You must be getting a ton of traffic for it to still be paying rent after 8 years! Congrats!
I've wanted to learn Music Theory for about a decade (only learned guitar tabs as a teen and to read sheet music as an adult). Love what you made and just got the premium course.
But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to. Then I just manually create a new account and send an email saying so-and-so bought you this course with the login! nathan [at] lightnote.co
> But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to.
You could add an MVP by having a "Gift a subscription" link that leads to a page saying "buy a subscription and then click this link to email me who you want to gift it to". That at least means you don't have to keep answering the question for people.
On Firefox Android, in step four, I managed to get into a situation where one of the notes kept playing. It occurred when pressing too many keys on the keyboard demonstrating the chromatic scale. Pressing each key again for not "unstuck" it.
And if I'm already providing feedback, then a nice improvement for the end of step two would be an option to hear the two notes of the displayed waves, together.
Very nice. I'd suggest adding another deluxe bundle for non-Guitarists without the guitar theory. I'd pay extra for the ear training + the base package.
Hey! My son used your site! So, thanks for that. This was a couple of years ago that a music teacher recommended it to him to help boost his progress. I think you continue to sell because your prices are very good for what you are offering, and the site is designed in a way that allows anyone to pick up on things fairly quickly.
Wow. I’m very impressed by the site and even more so by how you did it over a winter break. It’s definitely very intuitive and I’ve been looking for a way to learn music theory as an adult. Thank you!
When I was learning guitar a few years ago, I came across your website and really loved it. But after that, I forgot about it. Your website is great, very easy to undersand, and the UI is also great.
Thank you for mentioning the effect of Paypal, that's very interesting. Did you add it as a full-on alternative to Stripe, or just activate the payment method in Stripe ?
Love it, and I very much understand the level of work that went into making it (beyond your initial landing page). Good way to test the water then build the full product.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
https://www.lightnote.co/