>I say this as it is an interesting case of 'more than one way to skin a cat'
You're basically skinning the cat the same way, you just don't know the terms of the steps involved or the theory (the "why") behind them, and can't generalize it to ways to skin all kinds of other animals, and even do taxidermy on them - things that the author does.
You however might have picked some special tricks of cat-skinning, and self-taughtingly built your own small conventions, that the author might not know, but which still follow music theory - which, in musicology, is way broader than "common practice" music theory -, (and the author could also delve into them and explain their function theoritically if he played the same genre and bothered to check them out).
You're basically skinning the cat the same way, you just don't know the terms of the steps involved or the theory (the "why") behind them, and can't generalize it to ways to skin all kinds of other animals, and even do taxidermy on them - things that the author does.
You however might have picked some special tricks of cat-skinning, and self-taughtingly built your own small conventions, that the author might not know, but which still follow music theory - which, in musicology, is way broader than "common practice" music theory -, (and the author could also delve into them and explain their function theoritically if he played the same genre and bothered to check them out).