I’d heard the song before, but it had never really grabbed me. Good enough for the rotation, nothing more. Then — I couldn’t tell you exactly when — maybe on the 10th listen towards the end of the outro solo, it hit me - This is the greatest song I’ve ever heard ✨
Hit play. Read on.
That moment happens a couple of times a year to me if I'm lucky. But that’s the beautiful thing about music. You don’t choose what moves you or when. Sometimes it isn’t even love at first listen. But when you connect with a song, it’s like magic. It suddenly becomes the soundtrack to a certain time and place in your life — no matter from how long ago. I’m still rediscovering old Neptunes tracks that take me back to 2003.
When you’re a musician it goes further, because learning a song adds a whole new dimension to loving it. Grammy award-winning artist and guitar virtuoso John Mayer put it better than I can:
“If you study it incorrectly, you sound just like it. If you study it correctly, you actually don’t. You break it down to its smallest particle, then rebuild it — and nobody, not even yourself, will notice it came from anywhere. It’s not really the chords or the lyrics. It’s some other little intent.”
John Mayer
That’s the whole craft, right there: break the song down to its particles, then rebuild it as your own. It's like alchemy. Greater musicians than me have spent lifetimes in happy pursuit of this goal.
But the first step is breaking it down and that is, for so many, where the trouble starts.
It’s a great time to learn how to play the guitar. With YouTube channels such as Active Melody, Boombliss, GuitarZero2Hero, there's a whole world of guitar content in the palm of your hand. In fact, most of my time learning was spent watching countless YouTube tutorials. A cover of Frontin’ today, some blues licks tomorrow... maybe check out that modes video if the thumbnail looks interesting enough. We've all come across that clip promising to “100x your playing in 30 days.” Don’t get me wrong, as someone with no background in music, those videos were invaluable and I got a lot out of them. But there is so much freedom of choice it’s hard to find what works for you and shape it into a consistent routine.
And when you do find a working routine? You encounter obstacles everytime you set up to practice. Checking what’s on the agenda. Setting up the metronome. Remembering where you left off. Playing along with a song and having to manually rewind a section, over and over again just to try and nail that one lick. You push through, because nothing worth having comes easy — but those obstacles chip away at your motivation, bit by bit, until that practice schedule you worked so hard to build becomes a relic of a bygone era.
Those obstacles are the gap between you and what Mayer’s describing. Breaking a song down to its smallest particle is exactly the work the setup keeps getting in the way of. It's what I encountered trying to learn Red Moon and it’s what inspired me to develop this app.
Red Moon takes the many tools you need to practice — the metronome, the music, the loops, the exercises — and gives them a home. A workshop where you can slow a song down, isolate the lick and loop it, over and over again taking it apart one bar at a time. Custom scale, chord and arpeggio exercises to improve your technique on your terms. And an intelligent practice routine that integrates all of these features and adapts to your goals and preferences. Everything where you need it, so you can skip the setup and get to the part that actually matters. Practice.