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Revolution Harmony

Revolution Harmony

By: Ray Harmony
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 Welcome to the unorthodoX teachings of multi award-winning music lecturer Ray Harmony. Co-taught by Kate Harmony, his wife and protégé. As a songwriter and producer, Ray has made music with Grammy winners and multiplatinum artists, including Serj Tankian (System Of A Down) and Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine). This space is like a songwriters' ark, where all the music making skills are being preserved through this global AI flood. The flood shall pass. The skills will last. Join over 250,000 YouTube subscribers learning the fast, easy, and fun way to make music without using AI, cos it ain't no fun getting a robot to write “your” songs! Download Ray's free book @ HackMusicTheory.com© 2025 Revolution Harmony Music
Episodes
  • Don’t Trust Me, I’m an Expert.

    Don’t Trust Me, I’m an Expert.
    Oct 16 2025
    Don’t Trust Me,I’m an Expert. Confessions of an INFJ. I’m a multi award-winning music lecturer with over 30 years of teaching experience, 10 of those years being at one of the UK’s largest colleges. I studied classical guitar, piano, and music theory (all to the highest grade) at the world-renowned Royal Schools of Music. Then I moved to Los Angeles to study contemporary guitar and vocals at the world-renowned Musicians Institute. On top of that, I’ve made music with Grammy winners and multiplatinum artists, including Serj Tankian (System Of A Down) and Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine). So with regards to making music and teaching music, it’s safe to say that I’m an expert. But if you want to learn how to make music, don’t trust me! Wait… What?! Let me explain. But first, we need to take a little detour. On average, people can be divided into 16 personality types. This is known as the Myers-Briggs (or MBTI) system, and it’s based on Carl Jung’s model of the eight cognitive functions. It’s an utterly brilliant system that will change your life, if you take the time to learn it. You can start by simply discovering what your personality type is. To do this, I recommend Dr. Dario Nardi’s free online test, which you can take at: keys2cognition.com. Invite your friends and family to do it, too. Then, if you want to learn about the 16 personality types, I recommend going to the source and reading the book “Gifts Differing” by Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter B. Myers. Okay, the detour’s over. So now, what’s personality type got to do with not trusting me? Everything! That’s the short answer. The slightly longer answer is this: Personality type has everything to do with everything! And that’s not hyperbole. Subscribe to get the latest posts in your inbox. If you’re like me, then you’re also constantly looking around wondering why we can’t all just get along by respecting each other’s differences and beliefs. In fact, one of the countless reasons I deleted all my social media accounts 10 years ago, was that I couldn’t take any more angry arguments. Just look at any social media thread, and you’ll see how obvious it is that those people are talking (or shouting) past each other. That’s because they have very different personality types, and therefore, very different perspectives. They’re never going to agree. They can’t. And arguing over which perspective is correct is in actual fact arguing over which personality type is correct. But that’s a meaningless pursuit, because no one personality type is better than any other. Each type has its unique gifts. And each type has its unique perspectives. The only discussion worth having is which perspective is best suited for each personality type. A healthy society needs all the personality types and their differing perspectives, otherwise it loses its balance and harmony. And then descends into intolerance. Now, here’s the life-changing conclusion you reach when you learn about personality types. Are you ready? You might want to sit down for this. Okay, here it is: Every perspective will always be wrong for 15 out of the 16 personality types. In other words, every perspective you have on every topic will be 94% wrong according to all the personality types. If there’s only one thing you take away from this post, please let it be that. Every perspective you have is 94% wrong. And every perspective I have is 94% wrong. Subscribe to get the latest posts in your inbox. With this realization comes a whole truckload of humility! Because, how could I possibly think that my perspective is right for you? Especially considering that my personality type, INFJ, is the rarest of all the types. Okay, here’s a broader way of looking at it. Half the personality types have the cognitive function of intuition in their top two preferences, while the other half have sensing. But, intuition is far more rare than sensing. It’s estimated that only 30% of the population are intuitive personality types, while 70% are sensing personality types. So if you’re wanting to learn how to make music, my unique Song-Whispering method will deeply resonate with you if you’re an intuitive type, but if you’re a sensing type, then it probably won’t. And let me be clear, the method will work for everyone, but it will seem very strange to the 70% of people who are sensing types. And this is true for everything. There’s literally no topic that you can’t find equally qualified experts with diametrically opposed perspectives. Even when they agree on the same data points, their interpretations lead them to polar opposite conclusions. And I’m not exaggerating. Even topics we think are settled, are not. For example, did you know that there are medical doctors who say DNA does not exist? Or, did you know that there are physicists who say atoms and subatomic particles don’t exist. These things are supposed to be ...
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    8 mins
  • The Uglification of Music.

    The Uglification of Music.
    Nov 12 2025
    The Uglification of Music. Can a return to beauty save music? Okay I know you’ve just started reading this, but please stop (temporarily), then go and listen to the second movement of J.S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major. Its nickname is “Air on a G String”, so just search for that. Even if you know this piece, please go and listen to it again. Then come back. I’ll wait… So how do you feel now? Calm and cleansed, right? It’s like a warm, relaxing, musical bath. That, my friend, is the power of beauty! It’s only about five minutes of music, but it literally changes our body’s chemistry, which in turn improves our mental and physical health. In five minutes! And all we have to do is close our eyes and listen. If you’re like me, you’ll now have two questions on your mind. Firstly, if five minutes of beautiful music can make us feel that good, then why don’t we listen to more beautiful music? And secondly, why is almost all music nowadays so ugly? The answer to the first question of why we don’t listen to more beautiful music is that we live in a culture of non-stop stimulation, so the peace that emanates from beautiful things feels boring to us. That’s why most people prefer looking at screens rather than trees, and listening to podcasts rather than birds. This need for constant stimulation is why the world is overrun with phone zombies, or phombies, as I like to call them. When I was growing up in the ‘80s, people were told to stop and smell the roses because the pace of life was getting faster and faster. Nobody seemed to have time for the simple pleasures anymore, like enjoying the beautiful scent of a flower. In those days people at least saw the roses, even if they didn’t stop to smell them. However, these days the only roses most people see are in their social media feeds. The non-stop stimulation from phones is addictive. Beauty doesn’t stand a chance! Subscribe to get the latest posts in your inbox. Now, the answer to the second question is that most music is ugly nowadays because it’s way easier to grab and hold people’s attention with shocking things. So, it’s inevitable that in this age of never-ending content for people to consume, songwriters and producers will use shock tactics to get noticed. That’s why new songs are filled with jarring sounds, abrupt rhythms, and extremely crude lyrics that are programmed into the listeners’ minds via hypnotically repetitive melodies. So while beautiful music may be able to momentarily catch some people’s attention, the magic of that fleeting moment quickly fades, and their scrolling resumes. And even if they keep listening to the music, it’s relegated to a background soundtrack. And for the record, I’m not saying that all music should be beautiful. I started my first metal band way back in 1991, so I’ve been making ugly music for decades. Having said that, though, ugly music can (and should) be creative and well written. Also, not all classical music is beautiful. Try listening to the first movement of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. It’s less than two minutes, but you need endurance to get through it. I love Schoenberg, and that piece is genius. But beautiful? Definitely not! So while I do acknowledge that there’s a time and a place for ugly music, it’s obvious from listening to the new releases on Spotify every Friday that modern music has a big ugly problem. The same way it’s obvious from looking at most cities in the world that we’ve got an ugly architecture problem, too. As the world continues to get uglier, we need to listen to more beautiful music as an antidote. Subscribe to get the latest posts in your inbox. Here’s where things get nuanced, though. I’m making the case that we need to save music from uglification by restoring its beauty. But, before civilizations developed and made the world ugly, music was not created to be beautiful, it was created to dance to. I don’t mean dancing like we think of it today, I mean dancing as a means to enter a trance. Once the shamans entered this state, they’d communicate with the spirits, heal their tribe members, and do other spiritual work. It’s interesting to note that most hunter-gatherer cultures don’t even have separate words for music and dance. They’re inseparable. They’re one activity. Therefore, the music of hunter-gatherers is mainly focused on rhythm. The melodies are usually simple, and harmony is usually non-existent. This fascinates me, as these are humans living naturally, the way we’re all supposed to be living. So why is their music not focused on beauty? Here’s my current hypothesis: They’re living in nature, permanently immersed in natural beauty made by the Creator, therefore they don’t need any more beauty, especially not inferior man-made beauty. Hunter-gatherers are humans in the wild. City dwellers are humans in a zoo. We’ve imprisoned ourselves in an artificial ...
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    13 mins
  • You Can’t Make Music without Using Theory.

    You Can’t Make Music without Using Theory.
    Sep 25 2025
    You Can’t Make Music without Using Theory. “I don’t use music theory, because rules limit my creativity.” If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say that in my 30 years of teaching music theory, I wouldn’t be living in a rented one-bedroom apartment, that’s for sure! The Oxford dictionary defines language as a “system of communication.” We can’t communicate through speech without using words, and we can’t communicate through music without using notes. The system of communicating with words is called grammar. The system of communicating with notes is called music theory. If you’re using notes, you’re using music theory. Therefore, it’s impossible to make music without using theory. The only choice songwriters have is whether to use it consciously or unconsciously. In other words, do we want to express ourselves consciously and therefore eloquently, or do we want to express ourselves unconsciously and therefore like two-year-olds? When I listen to a song made by someone who claims to not use music theory, I hear the equivalent of a musical two-year-old expressing themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s your thing. After all, two-year-olds certainly have a unique way of conveying their emotions. Nobody would argue with that! However, if you prefer a maturer form of expression, then you’ll want to listen to someone with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of language. Subscribe to get the latest posts in your inbox. When it comes to speaking in our first language, we don’t have to consciously think about the system underlying our communication. That’s because we learned the language from such a young age. It’s second nature. Most babies say their first word around the age of 12 months. Imagine if we started music around that age, too. It would also be second nature by the time we’re five, which is when Mozart composed his first piece. For the rest of us, though, we have to learn music theory like we learn vocabulary and grammar of a second language. If someone thinks they can eloquently express themselves in a language they don’t know by simply using their ear, good luck to them, but even with luck on their side they’re still going to sound like a two-year-old. It’s the same when it comes to expressing oneself musically. If we want to make good music, we need to learn music theory. In other words, we need to learn the rules. That’s a dirty word nowadays, but rules can be good. For example, I live close to an elementary school, so the speed limit on the roads here is slow enough that grannies on bicycles overtake me. Is that rule bad? Of course not! If a kid runs out into the road, which they tend to do, they’re far more likely to get hit by a cycling granny than by my car. Rules can be good. And when it comes to music, the rules make our songs sound good. So if you’re still relatively inexperienced at making music, why wouldn’t you want to follow them? In the future, you can (and should) break the rules. But not yet. Subscribe to get the latest posts in your inbox. Also, it’s worth remembering that when we first start driving, learning all the rules and remembering to follow them demands much of our energy and attention. After a few years of driving, though, it becomes rather natural. And after a few decades of driving, it becomes instinctual. Same with music theory. I can’t remember the last time I felt limited by the rules. Maybe about 32 or 33 years ago. It’s also worth mentioning a common and excruciatingly embarrassing situation many songwriters find themselves in, which is claiming that their music breaks the rules, when in actual fact it obeys them. I’ve come across countless examples of this, and it makes me cringe every time! Think about how obvious this problem is. How can anyone say they’re breaking the rules, unless they know the rules? Don’t be that songwriter who tries to act cool by saying they don’t use music theory. That’s not a choice anyone has. The only choice is whether to use it consciously or unconsciously. You decide. And on that note, if you’re new to making music (or if you want a refresher), I offer you a free download of my book 12 Music Theory Hacks to Learn Scales & Chords. It only takes about half an hour to read, then you’ll have a solid foundation of the basics. If you’re ready to go deeper, though, then I invite you to enroll in my online apprentice course, where you’ll learn one method to write unlimited songs in any genre. This method guides you through every step of the music making process, from blank screen to finished song. Happy learning, and welcome aboard the Songwriter’s Ark*. Ray Harmony :) *I visualize Hack Music Theory as a Songwriter’s Ark, where all the music making skills are being preserved through this global AI flood. The flood shall pass. The skills will last. Donate. Help keep the Songwriter's Ark afloat...
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    5 mins
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