“So where is YOUR hit song?”

Sometimes people send me a message or comment on my posts asking “so where is YOUR hit song?”.

I get where this comes from, but the truth is, a theory or system in music isn’t validated by the author’s own catalog of hits, it’s validated by whether it accurately explains patterns in existing successful music and gives others tools to use.

When you go to a bookstore to buy a book about basic music theory (chords, scales, intervals, etc) do you ask where the author’s hit songs are?

And do you think literally ALL music teachers are useless unless they have a hit song?

Let me explain how wrong this logic is, and why you actually have to be careful with learning from successful people.

Over the past years, I have purchased songwriting courses from three successful, Grammy-award-winning songwriters. I won’t mention their names because I don’t want to attack them. I did not learn anything from those courses.

Not because I know so much about songwriting. I did not learn anything from them about songwriting because they did not teach anything about it.

Of those three people, two even admitted in the video course that they have zero theory about songwriting, they just throw things at the wall and keep what sticks.

Again, we’re talking about three Grammy-winning songwriters with multiple hits, and they can teach you literally nothing about how to write a song.

On the other hand, I have spent the last 7 years analyzing thousands of successful songs – chord progressions, melodies, rhythm, lyrics – and I have found several “patterns” that appear in highly successful songs.

I’m not talking about copy-paste patterns but complex patterns, ideas, and systems that you can use to create completely unique songs. In other words, I can teach you several practical songwriting tools that all successful songwriters use.

You have probably heard about the great composers Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Claudio Monteverdi, Henry Purcell.

But you probably never heard the name Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the first major theorists to systematically explain tonal harmony in his 1722 book. Much of the tonal harmony people learn in music schools today exists because of Rameau’s work.

But here’s the thing: Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Monteverdi, and Purcell already composed music BEFORE Rameau published his music theory book…

So Rameau’s role wasn’t to create the music, but to uncover the system behind what great composers were already doing, creating a framework musicians could use for centuries to come.