Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers

The producer's guide to harmony, chord progressions, and song structure in the MIDI grid.

By: J. Anthony Allen

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The producer's guide to harmony, chord progressions, and song structure in the MIDI grid.
As an online and university class, Dr. Allen has had over 50,000 students use this ground-breaking curriculum to learn music theory. Students and Producers who have wanted to learn music theory to improve their own music, but have been intimidated by traditional approaches, music notation, and abstract concepts will find this book to be the answer they have been looking for.
From the Author: “How music theory is usually taught is unfair. It starts with the assumption that you can read music and understand the language of classical music. My book leaves all of that behind – focusing only on the MIDI grid that producers are already familiar with to learn all the key concepts of music theory, and ultimately, make better music.”
This book covers all the fundamentals of music theory but is written using the language of the DJ and Producer – the MIDI Grid. It includes “analysis” projects that look at the harmonic and melodic ideas in songs by popular producers including Zedd, Boards of Canada, Daft Punk, Deadmau5, Bonobo, Richie Hawtin, Moby, Skrillex, and Aphex Twin.
Praise for Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers:

“Aspiring electronic musicians have choices to make when it concerns their own education and training. This text makes one choice much easier: start here and get learning, quickly. Grounded and easygoing, the book uses real-world examples to help you make sense of music’s inner workings while steering clear of dense theories.”
– Michael J. Ethen, PhD
Musicologist
“This book knocks the oftentimes alienating world of music theory completely onto it’s side. Difficult to explain concepts are perfectly demonstrated for the aspiring electronic music producer who might have no formal music training. A must-have for all aspiring producers.”
– James Patrick (DJ, Producer, Educator)
Slam Academy, Dubspot, IPR, Ableton Certified Trainer
“With Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers, Dr. Allen has produced a remarkable resource: an extensive tour of musical theory that leverages some of our favorite modern tools – the virtual studio and it’s piano roll note display. By introducing us to the “why” as well as the “what” of music theory, this book helps us to understand what makes music tick and how to improve our own work. In addition to offering a sound theoretical foundation, the deep dives into analyzing tracks by Skrillex, Aphex Twin, and Deadmau5 keeps our attention focused on real-world production. MTEMP will definitely go on the top of my recommendation list for anyone that needs a fresh view of musical concepts.”
– Darwin Grosse
Director of Education, Cycling ’74

Incomplete

I really want to learn music theory but unfortunately the audio book did not come with diagrams or images included to accompany the lessons. I wish they could add an extra pdf for this. It is hard to follow on its own.

Doesn’t come with accompanying pdf

The ai narrator mispronounces ‘sharp’ throughout the listen and it also doesn’t come with any visualizations that the author repeatedly is referring to. Not a good listen, but getting the text version would probably be worth it.

AI Voice is unintelligible

Impossible to understand what mr. AI is saying because the text to speech is so awful. Constantly mispronounces words making it hard to follow. No pdf, I can't believe they released this. I doubt they even looked it over once for errors.

Wonderful book!

This explains things so well. I have been looking for a book like this. Some books make this so complicated but this gives an easy explanation and explains in a way I haven’t found before. Fantastic!

Can't handle layout/terminology/diagrams

While the content of the book may be ok and the Virtual Voice does not sound terrible - it has clear problems.

1. Pronouncing c# as C-hash, after explaining that it should be pronounced C-sharp. Clearly, the text was not pre-processed to do special treatment on that.
2. No diagrams availalbe as "attached PDF" in Audible, so all the frequent diagram references are not very useful
3. I think the footnotes get read out when the end of the original page was reached. So, in a middle of other sentenses and out of order. That's crearly a processing pipeline mistake.
4. I think the exercises also refer to something that was not transferred into Audio (a diagram?) So a lot of practical exercises are also useless.

It is not worth it, even as part of Plus.