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Music Theory & Harmony Lessons in Chicago
Music Theory Isn't About Rules. It's About Understanding Why You Got Goosebumps.
For a lot of musicians, the words music theory immediately bring back memories of textbooks, Roman numerals, interval drills, and trying to remember which scale belongs over which chord. Somewhere along the way, theory developed a reputation for being dry, intimidating, or even something that gets in the way of creativity. I think the opposite is true.
Music theory isn't a collection of rules that tells you what you're allowed to play. It's a language that helps explain why certain sounds create tension, why others feel like home, why one chord seems to pull naturally toward another, and why a simple melody can make you feel something long before you understand how it was written. Once you begin hearing those relationships, theory stops feeling like homework and starts becoming one of the most useful creative tools you have.
That's the approach I take in my music theory and harmony lessons in Chicago. Rather than asking students to memorize information in isolation, we build connections between ideas. Functional harmony, voice leading, ear training, chord construction, reharmonization, rhythm, melody, composition, and improvisation aren't separate subjects. They're different ways of looking at the same musical language.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see is that becoming a better musician means learning more information. Most intermediate and advanced players already know far more than they realize. They've learned scales, chords, songs, exercises, bits of theory, and probably a collection of ideas from teachers, YouTube videos, books, rehearsals, and gigs. The problem is usually that those ideas exist as separate islands. The goal of studying harmony is to start building bridges between them.
"Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art."
- Claude Debussy
Functional Harmony, Voice Leading & Reharmonization
A chord by itself doesn't tell us very much. What matters is what it's doing.
A D minor chord could be a ii chord in C major, a vi chord in F major, a temporary tonic, part of a modal passage, the beginning of a sequence, or something being used for color rather than traditional function at all. The notes haven't changed, but our understanding of them has. That's why I spend much more time teaching students to recognize relationships than memorizing isolated chord symbols.
Functional harmony gives us a way to understand movement. Voice leading helps us understand how one harmony becomes another. Reharmonization teaches us that there are usually far more possibilities available than the first chord progression we learned. Once those ideas begin working together, something interesting happens: you stop seeing a song as a fixed set of instructions and start seeing the architecture underneath it.
This can mean studying secondary dominants, borrowed harmony, diminished passing chords, tritone substitutions, pedal tones, modal interchange, upper structures, chromatic harmony, extensions, inversions, contrary motion, or dozens of other ideas. But the terminology isn't really the point. The question is always what those sounds let us do musically.
That distinction matters especially for guitarists. It's easy to spend years collecting chord shapes without understanding why they work. In my advanced guitar lessons, harmony becomes a way of connecting the fretboard rather than memorizing another group of diagrams. A chord voicing becomes useful because you understand the voices inside it, how they can move, and what other harmonies they can become.
Ear Training, Improvisation & Learning to Hear Harmony
Theory becomes dramatically more useful once you can hear it.
You can know that a dominant seventh chord contains a tritone, but that's very different from hearing the tension of that interval and anticipating where it wants to resolve. You can memorize what a major seventh sounds like on a flashcard, but the real goal is recognizing that color inside a piece of music and eventually hearing it in your head before you play it.
That's why ear training and improvisation are closely connected to the way I teach music theory. I don't want students to become dependent on written analysis. I want them to gradually recognize harmony in real time. When the bass moves, when an inner voice changes, when the harmony briefly tonicizes another key, or when another musician introduces a new color, I want that movement to become something you can hear rather than something you have to stop and calculate.
Improvisation is one of the best places to test that understanding because it forces you to make decisions immediately. You don't have time to solve an equation while the band is playing. You have to hear what's happening, recognize enough of the structure to orient yourself, and respond. That's one reason my improvisation coaching and harmony work overlap so heavily. The deeper your harmonic vocabulary becomes, the less improvisation feels like choosing the correct scale and the more it feels like manipulating color, tension, melody, rhythm, and space.
It's also why I'm skeptical of teaching concepts like modes as isolated systems. Knowing the name of a sound can be useful. Understanding the harmony underneath it gives you many more places to go.
Composition, Songwriting & Arranging
Some of the best music theory lessons happen when we stop analyzing someone else's music and try to build something ourselves.
Composition forces theory to become practical. If a melody isn't resolving the way you want, what can you change underneath it? If the chorus doesn't feel larger than the verse, is the problem orchestration, register, harmonic rhythm, melody, bass movement, or something else entirely? If a progression feels predictable, can you alter one voice instead of replacing the whole chord?
These questions are where composition, songwriting, arranging, and music theory begin to overlap. My background studying composition at Berklee College of Music shaped a lot of the way I think about this. Harmony was never particularly interesting to me as a collection of labels. It became interesting when those ideas could be used to solve musical problems.
For a songwriter, that might mean finding a more interesting harmonic direction without making the song unnecessarily complicated. For a composer, it might mean developing a small motif across a larger piece. For a guitarist, it could mean learning to create inner movement inside a chord progression. For an improviser, the same concept might become a new melodic possibility over a familiar set of changes.
The subject changes. The underlying musical thinking doesn't.
What We Work On
Every student comes in with a different musical background, so there isn't a single curriculum that makes sense for everyone. Some students have strong ears but very little formal theory. Others can analyze almost anything on paper but struggle to hear the same ideas when they're actually playing. Some are guitarists trying to understand the harmony behind the shapes they've learned. Others are songwriters, composers, producers, or improvisers looking for a deeper vocabulary.
Depending on your goals, lessons may include functional harmony, chord construction, extensions and alterations, voice leading, ear training, reharmonization, harmonic analysis, melody, rhythm, modal interchange, secondary dominants, diminished harmony, tritone substitution, upper structures, chord-scale relationships, jazz harmony, pop harmony, arranging, composition, songwriting, improvisation, and fretboard harmony.
We may analyze a Bill Evans voicing one week and a Radiohead song the next. We might look at Bach, Stevie Wonder, Wayne Shorter, The Beatles, film scores, jazz standards, your own music, or whatever else helps illuminate the idea we're studying. I'm much less interested in creating a hierarchy between "serious" and "popular" music than I am in understanding what makes any piece of music work.
Music Theory Lessons for Intermediate & Advanced Musicians
You don't need to arrive knowing everything.
In fact, some of my favorite students are musicians who have been playing for years and have reached the point where they know they're missing something but can't quite identify what it is. Maybe you can play difficult music but don't really understand the harmony. Maybe you know your scales but your improvisation feels predictable. Maybe you've written dozens of songs and keep reaching for the same four or five progressions. Maybe you've studied theory before but none of it ever felt connected to the music you actually wanted to make.
These lessons are particularly well suited to intermediate and advanced guitarists, improvisers, composers, songwriters, producers, and serious adult musicians who want something deeper than a traditional beginner theory curriculum. We can absolutely fill gaps in fundamentals when they're necessary, but the larger objective is always to connect those fundamentals to the musician you're trying to become.
Music Theory & Harmony Lessons in Chicago and Online
I teach private music theory, harmony, guitar, composition, and improvisation lessons in Chicago, and online when I’m traveling. Chicago has an unusually rich musical culture, and one of the great advantages of studying here is that the ideas we discuss don't have to remain theoretical. They can show up at a rehearsal, a jam session, a writing session, a gig, or a night listening to musicians around the city.
Whether you're studying jazz harmony, writing original music, preparing for music school, trying to become a stronger improviser, or simply tired of understanding music only at the surface level, the goal is the same: develop a musical vocabulary broad enough that theory becomes something you can actually use.
You shouldn't have to stop playing to think about theory.
Eventually, you should be able to hear it.
And once you can hear it, you have a lot more freedom to decide what happens next.
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I needed guitar lessons from an experienced music coach that had the patience to work with novices like myself. What I love most about my work with Cody is the ability to have video based sessions at times that work for my schedule. As an entertainer, I don't always know what my schedule will be week to week. I feel like I am learning a lot and able to work at a speed that allows me to absorb the teachings.
Johnny