study-music

Rock

• HookTheory - A database of many rock songs and some jazz songs and game tunes focused at harmonic analysis. Comes with a melody-harmony online editor HookPad and two must-read online books on pop/rock harmony which explain Roman numeral analysis, secondary chords and modes. You should probably start with those books unless you already have a college degree in music. You can read them in two weeks if you focus enough.
  • Dave Carlton. I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found - a series of posts
• Drew Nobile. Form as Harmony in Rock Music - A great coverage of harmony and form. The Caplin of rock.

• David Temperley. The Musical Language of Rock - A book that summarizes a corpus study of aspects like harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre and form on 200 rock songs. Also his papers. Also his other books: The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, Music and Probability

• Brett Clement. Rock Tonality Amplified. A Theory of Modality, Harmonic Function, and Tonal Hierarchy, also see this

• Philip Tagg. Everyday Tonality II - The author proves that applying classical harmony framework to all of modern popular Western music gives poor results, and that one must accept the wide existence of music in different modes, scales and non-tertian chord structures on our TV and radio.

• Christopher Doll. Hearing Harmony: Toward a Tonal Theory for the Rock Era - The author focuses entirely on chords and progressions, examining different effects and combinations analyzing and referencing over 600 songs.

• 🎥 David Bennett. Chord Progressions - A series of videos listing samples of songs for some chord progressions repeatedly used in rock

• 🎥 Four harmonic analyses by Augusto (Björk and Billie Eilish)

Particular musicians and bands

• Kasper Sloots. Frank Zappa’s musical language

• Brad Osborn. Everything in Its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead

The Beatles

• KG Johansson. The Harmonic Language of the Beatles - sadly, the whole book (in Swedish) isn’t available at all
• A complete transcription of songs
• Every song is analyzed by Alan W. Pollack in Notes On… series
• Walter Everett. The Beatles as Musicians
• Dominic Pedler. The Songwriting Secrets Of The Beatles
• Beabliography

Progressive rock

• Martin Quinn. The Development of the Role of the Keyboard in Progressive Rock from 1968 to 1980
• Edited By Kevin Holm-Hudson. Progressive Rock Reconsidered
• Gregory Richard McCandless. Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Dream Theater
• Brett G. Clement. Scale Systems and Large-Scale Form in the Music of Yes
• Mattias Lundberg. “To Let it Be Without Pretense”: Canon, Fugue, and Imitation in Progressive Rock 1968–1979

Metal

• Esa Lilja. Theory and Analysis of Classic Heavy Metal Harmony. (Caution: I suspect it may be esoteric due to overemphasizing the influence of power chord harmonics onto the chord patterns.)
• works of James Boddington Jordan and Jan-Peter Herbst
• https://www.youtube.com/@metalmusictheory5401
• https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.1/mto.21.27.1.garza.html
• https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.11.17.3/mto.11.17.3.osborn.html
• https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.2/mto.13.19.2.mccandless.html
• https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.4/mto.21.27.4.lucas.html
• https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.18.24.3/mto.18.24.3.lucas.html
• https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.22.28.1/mto.22.28.1.hannan.html
• https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.1/mto.21.27.1.hudson.html
• Capuzzo, Guy. 2018. “Rhythmic Deviance in the Music of Meshuggah.”
• Scotto, Ciro. 2017. “The Structural Role of Distortion in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal.”

More

• A lot of rock music is transcribed by transcribers like Andy Aledort, Paul Pappas, Addi Booth, some of it for Hal Leonard publisher.
• “Introduction to Harmonic Schemas in Pop Music”. In Open Music Theory
• 🎥 Calder Hannan. Metal Music Theory
• Walter Everett. Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems

• A cluster analysis of harmony in the McGill Billboard dataset

• Papers by Nicole Biamonte, a podcast

• The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research

• Allan F. Moore. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song - A broad overview on music theory and musicology

• Chord progressions of 5000 songs from Hooktheory

• https://www.angelfire.com/fl4/moneychords/classicrocklwsson.html

• Peter van der Merwe. Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music

(source)

• Stephen Hazel. Math Rock Essentials Guide for advanced guitar players. Also his Youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@LetsTalkAboutMathRock

• https://www.top40theory.com/blog

• advanced