Compose Yourself: On The Road

The goal of this lesson implies that you need to develop a rhythmic “vocabulary,” that is, a readymade repertoire of one-measure rhythms that you can quickly “hear” in your mind’s ear before you play them on your instrument. Developing a high “Rhythmic I.Q.” (“Imagination Quotient”) doesn’t happen overnight, and may in fact take years to hone, but you will be well on your way by the end of “Lesson 1.”

After “Lesson 1,” we have “Interlude – The Elements of Harmony.” Since Compose Yourself, the book, was written with intermediate music students in mind, the “Interlude” was supposed to be a review of music theory. However, I realize that many students have not had much music theory, so I will back up the text with a lot of explanation in the videos.

If the “Interlude” was all theory, it would not be as engaging as the other lessons in the book. In reality, the “Interlude” has one of the most interesting assignments in the entire course, because it lays the groundwork for hearing the “meaning” of melody and harmony. You will listen to 12 ascending and 12 descending melodic intervals, meditate deeply on how each interval makes you feel, and write down your impressions. (An “interval” is the distance in pitch between two notes. In a “melodic” interval the two notes are played one after the other. When they are played at the same time, they are called a “harmonic” interval.) Then you will listen to examples of the intervals being used in songs (lots of songs), and see how good songwriters use them as a kind of fundamental emotional “vocabulary.”

All four dialog games can be played with intervals. This will promote your use of the intervals in an inner-directed, meaningful way, rather than as a mindless musical drill or a speed contest.

“Lesson 2 – The Harmonic Journey” shows you how to build chords and chord progressions. We will learn to listen to chord progressions as a journey away from home and back home again. We will learn to think of harmonic movement as movement in space, nearer and farther away from the home base chord in the key. We will also learn about the major/minor key system and the circle of fifths, both of which are “must have” items for the songwriter’s toolbox.

Again, we will use the dialog games to make your harmonic improvisations meaningful to you and to your audience. We will listen to the way songwriters use and reuse the same chord progressions in different songs to achieve similar moods and emotional effects.

“Lesson 2” combines elements from “Lesson 1” and the “Interlude.” Throughout the book, we keep building on the concepts you’ve already mastered to achieve greater freedom of self-expression.

“Lesson 3 – The Heart of Melody” unlocks some of the secrets of melodic meaning. In this lesson we will combine the “interval colors” you learned in the “Interlude” with a new source of emotional self-expression, “scale-tone moods,” to create “melodic words.” Songwriters combine melodic words and lyrics in a coordinated fashion to achieve the magic that can only be found in a great song. Through the dialog games, you will begin to combine the poetry of melody and the poetry of lyrics in meaningful musical statements.

“Measure for Measure” began almost two years ago. In the intervening time, I’ve added a tremendous amount of new knowledge to the core ideas of “Lesson 3,” including concepts such as “rainbow phrase arcs” and “The Power of Three.” It will be fun adding these ideas into the mix in the YouTube videos, and it will be especially helpful, I believe, to design new dialog games around them.

“Lesson 4 – Secrets of Songwriting” discusses various ways to get ideas for songs, including “MC-Squared,” the surefire way to generate as many original melodic ideas as you want every single day of the week, whether you are feeling inspired or not. We will also explore the idea of “organic songwriting,” which means growing a whole song from a single idea via the dialog games.

Notice that each lesson builds on the previous lesson. “Lesson 4” capitalizes on everything from the lessons on rhythm, harmony, and melody in order to build larger units of songwriting, such as the verse, chorus, pre-chorus, bridge, intro and outro. By the time I got to “Lesson 4” in writing the book, I was already up to page 200, so I had to cut back on a discussion of lyrics. In the “Songwriting ABCs” lessons on YouTube, I will be discussing lyrics all along, and “Lesson 4” in particular will include a lot of new material that I was unable to fit into the book.

I hope this gives everyone a sense of where we’re going with the Songwriting ABCs course. If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at composeyourself@live.com.

Previously: Compose Yourself – To Read Or Not To Read