How Music Really Works: The Essential Handbook for Songwriters, Performers, and Music Students

by Wayne Chase

Now in its 2nd edition, How Music REALLY Works!: The Essential
Handbook for Songwriters, Performers, and Music Students, is the
classic "how-to" manual for anyone interested in playing, singing, or writing
emotionally powerful music.

The book focuses on specific techniques a player, vocalist, or songwriter
can use to seize the attention of listeners and move them emotionally.
For the benefit of the majority of musicians (amateur and pro) who do not
read music, the book contains no music notation. Instead it provides
in-depth, visually-oriented, easy-to-understand (and humorous!) text and
graphics covering every important aspect of music-making.

Genres: Music

889 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[David Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was generally a well-written book, with the right kind of information, cleverly presented, scientifically accurate. One thing that bothered me a lot was his insistence on obviating the need to read music. He spent lots of time on the theory aspect , which was great. When we got to chord progressions and melody notes, he went off on a rampage about all the successful people who couldn't read music, and therefore reading music was not a requirement for making money in the music industry. An interesting comment and probably technically true, but I find it hard to give full marks to a book about music theory that doesn't talk about music notation. In addition he has developed his own system which he spends a lot of time selling. Because it is his own proprietary system, he has to present it as better than all other systems, like the circle of fifths, which has been around for hundreds of years. True, it may not be absolutely necessary, but there's no reason for it to be degraded.

One other over emphasized focus, in my opinion, is his long section of formulae for creating great, sellable lyrics for the pop culture market. Again many of his ideas are interesting and perhaps true, but it seems like he wrote this book for a specific audience and didn't bother to announce for which audience it was intended.

On the other hand, his treatment of the history and psychology and physiology of music is fascinating.

A book well worth the money (especially for the digital version) if one is aware of his biases.

[Stephen Souza · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book with a a lot of invaluable information. There is NO music notation used at all in the book. I have had this book for many years now and still refer back to it. It's not only packed with valuable info, it also has a comical side at times. I liked learning to create Chase Charts to analyze songs. Like the tile says, How Music Really Works is The Essential Handbook For Songwriters, Performers, And Music Students. You can check out the First 6 Chapters of More than 400 Page at the original website for FREE! That's close to half the book for FREE.

[David Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliantly helpful but the author strongly promotes atheist opinions and should keep these views out of a book like this in my opinion. There are approx. 7 billion people in the world and many people including myself have experienced spiritual encounters which blow this authors atheism apart. Nevertheless if you take the authors atheism as a poor mans intellectual only experience, his music teaching is brilliant.

[Romann Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative but overlong.

[TheBabooshka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this amazing book in 2014 and since then I still come back to it as a reference to improve my understand of music and songwriting! It's loaded with excellent examples using popular and successful songs to demonstrate how theory translates into emotional enjoyment of music and songwriting as both communication and an art. I feel that most beginners wanting to learn about chord progressions and how to write melodies should dedicate time to read this book before searching haphazardly on the internet. Youtube has been a great resource for me as a visual learner, but this book explains nicely how notes within a chord interact with neighboring notes and WHY they create certain effects. How Music Really Works is still the only book which explains that in accessible language how all that works. Once a musician or songwriter learns those fundamentals, all the doors open for them to make conscious creative decisions. The same goes for the lyric section of the book. I have yet to see other resources go into the psychology of how language affects lyric writing.

[roger clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

an incredible wealth of information regarding music theory, composition, and songwriting. i can't believe this book isn't more well-known.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best songwriting book I've ever seen, by far (and I've read a ton of them).

It's really unfortunate that the publishing is so obscure/expensive.