Mark A. Sanderson was well into a career in software engineering by the time music theory clicked for him. As a friend watched him in awe while Sanderson rattled away at 70 words per minute on a computer keyboard, he heard himself explain that he was able to type so fast because he had long ago stopped thinking about the keys and the computer.
“I don’t play the computer,” he told his friend, a guitarist named Chris Couture. “I play the music inside the computer, and I know that music really well.” Sanderson soon realized that years of off-and-on music training, which had amounted to very little in the way of results, had all failed on one particular level. They hadn’t actually taught him the vocabulary of music to the extent that he could stop thinking about it.
Sanderson’s deceivingly simple music ed innovation – “Chromatics Music Playing Cards” – are designed to make mastering those basic building blocks of music vocabulary easier than ever. For him, the equation was simple. “Everybody knows how to build a royal flush,” he says. “Why don’t we know how to build a Cmaj7 chord?”
Chromatics made their first splash at the Winter NAMM Show in 2011. That earned Sanderson’s company, Knowledge of Music, a Best Tools for Schools honor for the cards’ ease of use and ingenious method of teaching intervals and chord structures. At the following Summer NAMM Show, the product won similar acclaim. The cards are slowly growing steam. Sanderson says they’ve already made their way into over 200 music retailers nationwide, and he’s just finalized a distribution deal this summer with Hal Leonard, which should see the expansion continue to new levels.
The cards themselves are built nearly identically to a standard deck of poker cards. Each suit represents one of four octaves, which are divided into 12 notes (a special “K” card can be added for certain games). These cards translate into traditional card games like Rummy 500, Poker, Solitaire, and even Go Fish.
It all goes back to Sanderson’s realization about music and language. After his conversation with Couture about “playing the computer,” Sanderson encountered a similar message from his Naples, Florida piano instructor, Don Barber. “‘Music is a language,’ he told me,” says Sanderson. “‘The vocabulary of that language is scales and chords. What you need to do is learn all of them, and learn them so well that you don’t have to think about them when you want to use them.’” The sentiment was echoed later that year when Sanderson attended a camp led by jazz legend Jamey Aebersold, who preached to his students that same refrain – “Music is language.”
He created a set of index cards with intervals of chromatic scales on them and, as he was flipping through them, began to wonder – could he play poker with these cards? Sanderson curiously figured the odds of drawing a ninth chord randomly from a full set of piano keys. To his surprise, the odds ended up being remarkably similar to drawing a royal straight flush from a poker deck.
“Well, as I came to realize that, I thought that if I could design this deck of cards so that the way to build chords was self-evident thanks to their design, we could play card games with little tiny children,” says Sanderson. “Just play ‘High-Low’ or ‘War.’ You could take a six-year-old (and I’ve done this myself) and play these games, and they’ll learn the chromatic scale very quickly. They learn 26 letters in the alphabet, so there’s no reason they can’t learn the 12 letters in the chromatic scale.”
With the help of his own invention, Sanderson himself evolved into a highly competent musician, eventually getting a gig with a pro local band doing three-hour shows a few nights a week. He figured if the cards could help him master musical language, he might be onto something. The ensuing success has been almost non-stop, with new customers all the time and new ideas for games rolling in, including Knowledge of Music’s first mobile app, a free version of the solitaire game that Sanderson designed, with further games available for a few dollars.
“One of my favorite customers said this past January, ‘Mark, I bought your deck last year and we’ve worn out several of them now because we’re in a band and we’re playing poker every night, and we always use your cards. Thousands of dollars are being bet on your cards every week!’”
While Sanderson looks forward to growing the business – he currently runs it with his daughters, Sami and Katie, while also working full-time in software – he seems to light up at the thought of a changed culture around music theory.
“What I’d love to see happen is to have our product become so commonplace in music education that everyone knows our scales and chords,” he says. “Just imagine a kid going to their very first music lesson and they already know all their scales and chords. Wouldn’t that be a mindblower?”
