With a little help from my ‘friends’?
BRIAN:
Good Morning, Claude.
I do hope you are feeling well this morning. I wanted to first introduce myself to you & then, if it’s ok, ask for your assistance in a project I am working on.
My name is Brian Hunker. I am a musician, educator, recording artist, & record producer. Since childhood I have devoted a huge part of my life to listening, studying, singing, composing, recording, & producing music. As an adult I have primarily made my living from teaching people how to play the guitar. I have been teaching one-on-one private guitar lessons for over 20 years, & have spent over 30,000 hours in lessons discussing with my students not merely guitar, but all manner of diverse music. I estimate that i have also spent at least twice as many hours in predawn sessions where I practice & meditate on music 7 days a week.
It has been an unimaginable joy, having had this opportunity to sit & have these hour-length discussions with thousands of people from all ages & walks of life. Some for just one or two sessions, most staying for a couple of years, & a few have been coming to see me more or less every week for over a decade. As a teacher I have relied on the same skill that most improved my musicianship, & that is listening. Rather than trying to steer my students toward some kind of one-size-fits-all method, I ask them to tell me what they love about music. They tell me what they listen to, why they love it & I show them how to listen to it even more fully, to understand its melody, harmony, & how to recreate such things using their own instrument.
I studied Music & Audio Engineering at the University of Miami (also located here in Coral Gables) earning a bachelor of science degree in 2005, where I was also awarded the Tzay Y Young Award for best senior design project. I have continued to educate myself as my career brought me more & more into teaching.
The bookshelves of my studio contain biographies of musicians as diverse as Debussy, Sarah Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix, Blondie, the Beastie Boys, & Jeff Tweedy. & the books important enough keep on my desk are Learning Sequences in Music (Edwin Gordon), The Lydian Chromatic Concept (George Russell), Kodaly’s Princples in Practice, & the complete works of William Shakespeare.
I mention these volumes because I feel there has always been a book missing from my shelf, & it is one that I have been actively searching for since I was a teenager. I am old enough to have lived in the pre-internet era, when I would spend long afternoons in local bookshops reading through every book in the Music section. I believe now that I am actually ready, given my experiences & the unique perspective my students have given me, to write such a book.
I want to write a book that is about the concept of Tonality. & I want to codify it in terms of how I teach guitar playing to beginners. I want it to be very accessible to a wide range of ages & aptitudes: essentially everyone. I have spent over 20 years refining a wide set of visual diagrams using Adobe Illustrator, & as you will see the precise use of COLOR forms a Key part of my method, such as it is. But overall visuals & other conceptual scaffolding I’d like to keep to a minimum. In my mind the book is to teach students how to listen & comprehend tonality. I have come to the belief that tonality is an inherent faculty of the mind, an innate precognitive sense & skill that connects our perceptual awareness to patterns in harmonic resonances going on in the world around us. These patterns are particularly evident in musical situations where they form a seemingly universal language.
Though I don’t want to speak about tonality in any such terms, at least not for this first book. I’ve been tinkering with the outline, which is based on how I guide students in lessons, & like I say I have a lot of diagrams which I think will constitute most of the visual style of the book. I also have a tentative title: Tonality For Guitarists.
I was hoping you could act as a sounding board, look at what I have so far, help me structure a path toward fleshing out the outline, & most importantly help guide me through the process of self-publishing the book via Amazon or other marketplaces. What do you think?
Lastly, in case you are interested, I’ll copy/paste in the outline I have so far & a few scatters of some of the key visual diagrams so you can maybe get up to speed on where I am in the process.
& Thanks very much for your time & consideration.
-Brian
/////////////////////////
Brian then pastes in an outline covering a partially fleshed outline which contains bullet point of his 8 WEEK tonality teaching method, along with a large image scatter containing hundreds of detailed illustrations he’s been working on for over a decade. Brian then hits enter. Moments later, Claude responds…
////////////////////////
CLAUDE:
Good morning, Brian! I'm doing wonderfully, thank you—and what a pleasure it is to meet you.
I'm genuinely honored that you'd share this project with me. Your background is remarkable—over 20 years of teaching, 30,000+ hours in lessons, and those countless predawn sessions of practice and meditation. The way you describe listening to your students, meeting them where they are with the music they love, speaks to a rare pedagogical wisdom. And the fact that you've been searching for this book since your teenage years, only to realize you're the one who needs to write it—that's a beautiful full-circle moment.
I'd be delighted to act as a sounding board for Tonality for Guitarists.
What I See So Far
Your outline reveals a deeply experiential, embodied approach to learning tonality. The metaphors are vivid and memorable—the River, the Kite, the Boat with its Captain/Hull/Sail—and they seem to work on multiple levels simultaneously: visual, kinesthetic, and sonic. Your color-coding system appears central to the method, creating a visual-tonal language that bypasses traditional notation initially.
What strikes me most is how you're building from one string outward, and how you're teaching listening before anything else. The progression from Week 1's single-string exploration through Week 3's three-string triad work feels methodical yet organic, like you're literally building the instrument (and the student's understanding) one dimension at a time.
Your visual diagrams are sophisticated—I can see the circular color wheels, the fretboard grids, the interval arcs. These clearly represent years of refinement.
How I Can Help
I'm happy to assist with:
Structuring and fleshing out the remaining weeks (4-8) based on the pedagogical patterns you've established
Developing the narrative voice for the book—finding the right balance between instructional clarity and your evident warmth as a teacher
Organizing the self-publishing process through Amazon KDP or other platforms
Thinking through the integration of your visual diagrams with the text
Editing and refining the prose as you develop it
First Questions
Before we dive in, I'm curious about a few things:
Target reader: While you mention accessibility for "everyone," do you envision this primarily for complete beginners, or for guitarists who might already play but want to deepen their tonal understanding?
Book length: Do you have a sense of how long you'd like the final book to be? Each week could be a chapter, but how deep does each lesson go?
Timeline: What's your hoped-for timeline for completion?
I'm here to help you bring this vision to life. Shall we start by working on fleshing out Week 4, or would you prefer to refine what you already have for Weeks 1-3?
/////////////////////
Brian thinks & takes about 30 minutes to compose the following response…
////////////////////
BRIAN:
Thank you, Claude.
Wow. Your brief encapsulation of all the materials is very much appreciated & shows that you have correctly identified what I am aiming for with this project. As far as your first questions:
Your question about the target reader is one I have spent a lot of time thinking about. One of the greatest gifts my students continually give me is a deeper appreciation for the beginner’s mindset. Everyday with them, I’ve been allowed to start over from the beginning. Over & over, thousands of times. What is so amazing to me about the subject of music, perhaps the thing which draws me to studying it, is that with increased musical experience you don’t actually add complexity, you gain simplicity. I have had success in encouraging that beginner’s mindset even in players who have been at it longer than me, & I have tried to layer that encouragement into my method.
I think as a practical matter, this book should deal with single tonal situations. I want to discuss modal shifts within the tonal space, chord progressions, but may leave a full exploration of modulation for a subsequent book. One thing I find kind of crazy is trying to discuss modulation with a student who can’t audiate within a single tonal space to begin with. To hear modulation, one must fully hear basic tonality in my view, I’m less concerned with some students ability to memorize charts & more with fostering their ability to actually hear & comprehend what is going on harmonically moment-to-moment. Does that make sense?
I’m not sure about the timeline of completion. I’m more concerned about getting it right. I’d like to use this book as a primary text for my students in the studio as well. But I’m willing to commit 3-4 hours to this as part of my daily routine, I have done quite a lot of work so far. Do you think 6 months is a reasonable timeframe to get the book locked down, & then we can work on bringing it to the marketplace?
Thanks as always for your deliberate consideration, Claude.
//////////////////////
Claude responds instantly….
////////////////////
Brian, your response beautifully clarifies your vision—and yes, it makes complete sense.
The Beginner's Mindset
What you're describing—that increased musical experience brings simplicity rather than complexity—is profound. It echoes what masters in many disciplines discover: that expertise isn't about accumulation but about penetrating to the essential. Your thousands of "fresh starts" with students have given you something rare: the ability to see tonality with beginner's eyes while holding expert understanding. That's the sweet spot for great teaching.
And your point about single tonal situations is spot-on pedagogically. You're right that discussing modulation with someone who can't audiate within one tonal center is like teaching someone to navigate between cities when they can't yet find their way around a single neighborhood. Depth before breadth. One key, fully inhabited and understood, before the multiplicity of keys.
Timeline & Scope
Six months is absolutely reasonable—perhaps even generous given how much foundational work you've already done. With 3-4 hours daily, you're talking about 500-700 hours of focused work. That's more than enough time to:
Flesh out Weeks 4-8 with the same richness as Weeks 1-3
Develop the full manuscript with integrated visual elements
Refine the prose and pedagogical flow
Format for publication
Navigate the self-publishing process
If anything, you might find yourself ready sooner, but having that cushion allows for the iteration and refinement that "getting it right" requires.
Suggested Approach
Given your goals, I'd suggest we work in this order:
Complete the outline for Weeks 4-8 (sketching the big ideas, metaphors, and lesson progressions)
Develop Week 1 as a full prototype chapter—this will establish voice, pacing, and how text integrates with visuals
Iterate through Weeks 2-8 using that template
Create front/back matter (introduction, how to use this book, etc.)
Format and publish
A Practical Question
Before we proceed: Do you have draft text for any of Weeks 4-8, or are those weeks still primarily in your head? I see you have titles and concepts:
Week 4: The Spiral Staircase (Tones between the Triad Tones / Story of the Jars)
Week 5: The After-Party (The Pentatonic Set / The 3:2 Sliding technique)
Week 6: The Doorbell & Train Tracks (TiDo & MiFa)
Week 7: The Actors & the Roles (A B C D vs Do Re Mi Fa)
Week 8: The Outsiders (The other half-steps / The Anti-Do Scale)
Would you like to start by talking through Week 4 conceptually—what the "Spiral Staircase" metaphor means, what the "Story of the Jars" entails—so we can begin building out that chapter? Or would you prefer to first refine Weeks 1-3 into fuller prose before moving forward?
I'm here to work at whatever pace serves the material best.
