Art of Composing Academy

The course is structured in a logical, step by step way to introduce new ideas and techniques, and then reinforce them along the way. Many students have told me over the years that it really help to clear up confusing aspects of theory they learned in school and make them practical.

Create a Basic Melody: a simple way to start composing right now.

Make More of Your Melody: With just three techniques, chord tones, passing tones, and neighbor tones, you can create a huge variety of melodies, with very little mental effort.

Master the Essentials of Harmony: Understand the basics of harmony quickly, so you can move onto what you really want to know - how to create chord progressions.

C Major and Fundamental Chord Progressions: Begin the process of integrating critical progressions, scales, and patterns into your playing and composing.

How Harmony Works: We'll look at functional harmony in depth, and then we’ll use a very handy chart to start creating functional chord progressions.

Harmony and the Real Power of Limitations: A practical section for you to start gaining more compositional vocabulary.

Understanding Form: Open up a whole new world of possibility in your compositions. Form is more than just how a piece is put together - it is really about how music interacts with time.

Compose a Sentence: Create forward momentum with one of the best ways to organize your themes.

Generating and Refining Basic Ideas: Writing great themes starts with being able to generate and refine two bar basic ideas.

Chord Progressions, Minor Keys, and Simple Modulation: This section should unravel a lot of the mysteries of creating logical sounding chord progressions, adding simple chromaticism (applied dominants), and modulating to closely related keys. First, we will look at functional harmony in depth, and then we’ll use a very handy chart to start creating functional chord progressions. From there, we move onto minor keys. Once we’ve covered both major and minor, we are ready to modulate.

Master Melodic Composition: Learn how to use scale lines, chord lines, and rhythm together as one coherent whole.

Understand Voice Leading and Harmonization: We'll look at critical aspects of voice leading and harmony, such as range, doubling, completeness, spacing, and melodic motion. We'll also look at how to harmonize a melody.

Compose a Period: The period has a balanced, complete feel, and is often used in themes of all types.

Embellish Your Melody: Melodic embellishment is one of the most powerful ways to enhance and vary your melody.

Composing a Beginning, Middle, and End: Small Ternary Form: This form will be the basis for our capstone project, the bagatelles. Small ternary form is a very common theme type, and is somewhat the forerunner to the more modern songwriting conventions of the AABA song form.

Adding Accompaniment: We'll look at how accompaniment works, and how you can turn any chord progression into a great sounding accompaniment.

Capstone Project: A Few Bagatelles: In the capstone project, you have more freedom than you have had in previous exercises. This is where you spread your wings and fly.