I want to start by showing you something.
No talking, no explaining. Just watch what’s possible now.
Watch first — demo (no commentary)
That clip you just watched? That guitarist is Justus West — a songwriter and producer I came across on TikTok. I heard something in those few bars that I immediately wanted to learn. And what you saw me do next is exactly the thing I’ve spent the last month building the ability to do.
Here’s the honest truth about why I disappeared: I got frustrated enough to build something.
“It’s a pain to constantly have to rewind from whatever source it is.”
You know that feeling. You’re watching a video, you hear a phrase — a lick, a chord voicing, a rhythmic idea — and you want to learn it. So you start rewinding. And rewinding. And every time you’ve nearly got it, you have to go back to the source and manually reselect the same little region again, just to get one more pass at it. Every transcribe app I’ve ever used works that way.
I wanted something different.
I wanted a way to capture audio from anywhere — a TikTok, a YouTube clip, a Spotify track, anything — and immediately start breaking it into chunks I could loop independently, progressively. A pyramid. Start with the first piece, get it, add the second, stack them. The way you’d naturally teach yourself something by ear, but without the friction.
That’s Music Phrase Pyramids. And below is me walking through the exact same Justus West clip, this time out loud, explaining the problem and showing how it gets solved.
The full walkthrough — with my commentary
What I’m most excited about is the capture part. You hear something on social media, you hit capture, play the audio, and now that phrase lives in the app. From there, you’re not just looping it blindly — you’re slicing it, stacking it, slowing it down, zooming in. You’re building a vocabulary, one phrase at a time.
I keep thinking about this idea of amassing a vocabulary. Every musician I admire has spent years collecting phrases — from records, from sessions, from things they overheard and had to work out.
Music Phrase Pyramids aims to make that collection process as frictionless as possible, wherever you happen to hear something worth learning.
It’s not in the App Store yet — that’s still the goal, and soon. But the website is live, and the best thing you can do right now if this resonates is get on the mailing list. You’ll be the first to know when it drops.
Want to know when Music Phrase Pyramids is available?
If you want to actually close the gap between what you hear and what you can play, you need a way to work with real musical phrases — not just concepts.
Music Phrase Pyramids is a tool I built to help with that.
It lets you take any audio and break it into progressive steps, so you can internalize, map, and build phrases in a structured way.
Explore more tools and creative resources in the Creative Life & Tools archive.
