Foundations of Making Music with Guy Michelmore

1. Introduction: Everybody and a very warm welcome to this quick start guide to how to write music. My name is Gary Mitcham. I've been writing music for a living for my entire adult life. And during that time, I've come to one or two conclusions. Those conclusions, I'm going to share with you. Now, this course is entirely genre agnostic. So whether you're interested in songwriting or writing enormous film scores or doing electronic music or folk music, or anything else, the fundamentals of writing music remain the same. And so that is what I'm going to be explaining to you. And the whole thing about writing music, and the more you think about it, when you've been writing music for a while, there is it's not all kind of just Oh, I had a wonderful idea. This whole idea just came into my head fully formed. That ain't how it works. There is a process. There's a process which almost everybody goes through. And whilst the process there's lots of variations on this process, and, you know, different people do it different ways, there is a process nonetheless. And if there's a process, that means I can explain it to you, and that is how we're going to get this job done. We're going to be using what I call the five pillars of composition to help you write a piece of music. Those are the five main elements which go into any musical composition, harmony, melody, rhythm, texture, and structure. If we follow those things through, you are going to end up with a piece of music. Now, not all genres, um use those five pillars at all, and many genres will use them in different proportions. You know, if you're writing a piece of hip hop in rap, obviously, melody is less important than the lyrical content and the rhythmic content. If you're writing an Indian rag, there's almost no harmony. So different types and styles and genres of music will combine them differently. But nevertheless, those five pillars will be there in some shape or form. I'm going to take you from the very beginning of an idea through to a complete piece of music. How are we going to run this course? How are you going to learn? Well, First of all, I'm going to explain the basic idea in a video tutorial. Not dissimilar to this. I'm then most of the time going to demonstrate that particular technique, so you can see it in action. But it doesn't just stop there. It's going to be your turn, and we do this in a number of different ways. We have a thing which we call minus one, where basically we'll give you the elements of a short piece of music, but minus one crucial ingredient, and that's for you to add. So you might, for example, get a chord progression with some drums or something under it, which lacks a melody, a top line. Your job will be to add that top line. Now, the point of this is that it allows you to avoid the sort of blank sheet of paper syndrome, which is a bit Ah, no, not a blank sheet of paper. And it gives you somewhere to start. It gives you a quick way of focusing on one element of the music composition process so that you can get a result very quickly and so you can learn quickly. And you're also going to be writing a piece of music Bow, your tune, and we'll be taking that each chapter as we go through, and the chapters will follow the harmony melody, rhythm, texture, and structure sort of format so that you will end up at the end of this short course with a complete short piece of music. Now, is it going to be, you know, an epic symphony? Is it going to be an incredible film score? Is it going to be, you know, a song played on ready one? But once you've gone through the process once, you'll then start to see the incredible fun that writing music is, how incredibly satisfying it is and how much more there is to learn. And then, but you're going to have all these skills which you can then build on. And in months to come, you can go and learn more, have more fun, and become a better and better writer of music, composer, songwriter, whatever it's going to be. So that's how it's going to work. Are you ready to dive in? Right. Let's get going. 2. Workflow and Where Ideas Come From: Video, I'm going to be explaining the workflow, how you actually go about getting your original ideas, how you put it together. We're going to be doing the whole thing in microcosm so you can get an overview of where you're going. And we're also talking a little bit about where ideas come from, because if you've never written a piece of music before, it's difficult to know where to start. And that's really where we're going to kick off. What most people will do, I would think pretty much without exception is the initial spark of an idea will come either as harmonic idea, a chord progression. It could come as a melodic idea, a little kind of motif or a little idea for a hook or something like that. Or it could be a rhythmic idea. It could be, you know, you could start by building a beat. And then from that, you then add other elements to it because if you start with a chord progression, You're going to think, Okay, that's nice. But what's going over the top? La, la, la, la, la. So you're adding a melodic element to that. But at the same time, intertwined with all that, there's already a rhythmic idea in there. B, B, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So you start with one element, and then you wrap the other elements around it until you end up with what I like to call, you know, the basic building block of a piece of music. So once you've got that Wm, but, um, boom, boom, B, boom. You can start expanding it into something else. And that's when you start looking at texture, which is, you know, are we happy with just the very simple? Or do we want something more? Are we going to add other things to it? Are we going to use different instrumentation? Are we gonna use strings? Gives it a different feel entirely. You know, we could get a drumbeat going, we could get a bass line going. We could do all those kind of things. But it all starts with that one basic idea. And I could have started with a rhythmic idea. I could have started with a melodic idea, but as it was, I started just with that very simple harmonic idea. And before you know it, you've got this little thing. You've got this basic idea. And from that basic idea, you can then expand that into from what is essentially a very simple little motif into something slightly longer, a phrase. And then you can start combining phrases to make up a whole sort of section. And then you can start looking at how you structure your music and how you Okay, is that one section going to be enough or am I going to need a B section in the songwriting? You might well have written, for example, a verse, anything I know. Obviously, I'm going to need a chorus, so that's an A idea and a B idea. How are you going to then then make, you know, how are you going to use texture, arrangement, the density of the music, the speed of the music, the whole flavor of the thing. How are you going to change that over time? You see, that's where it all starts to get exciting, but don't get ahead of ourselves. It all starts with something as simple as that. Or it could be Okay, there's a simple melodic idea. It's, here we go. You start with that. From one little idea, other ideas develop. Now, I obviously play a keyboard. I'm reasonably comfortable doing that, and I can just improvise. And that improvising is a key part of composition. If you play an instrument, that's great. It makes life much, much easier, but it almost doesn't I mean, it is probably easier if you're playing a keyboard or a guitar or something like that. But really, I mean, composers come from all backgrounds, clarinet player, flute players, you know, citar players. There is no limit to where your instrument of choice is. I tend to play a keyboard, and I tend to use a computer door, which is like this machine sitting in front of me. This is logic. So we've got lots of sort of virtual instruments and all kinds of things. And that's basically it's like a sort of a word processor for music, and it works really, really well. I mean, many of you will also be using a computer door. It really doesn't matter which one you're using, whether you're using logic, garage band, cue base, reaper, FL Studio, Abt really doesn't matter because they'll all do what you need to do in order to be able to write a simple piece of music. But if you're not a computer user, you don't have to be. I mean, you can just sit there with a guitar. You can sit there with your phone. You can record the sit at a piano, come up with a basic idea, keep it on your phone so you don't lose it. How many good ideas go out the window, 'cause, that was great. What was it exactly? Oh, no, it's gone. Your chance of fame and fortune out the window. So if you do do it that way. And I do it that way as well. I'll sit down at a piano or pick up a guitar and have a little strum. You need to probably run a little voice memo app on your phone or something like that. So you've got some record of it. You can just pick up a pencil, you know, for those of you who are very musically illiterate, you can write straight on to manuscript paper. You can write your ideas out. So there's no one way of writing a piece of music. It's really what suits your particular skill set and where you're comfortable and where you're going to feel least inhibited about allowing your ideas to flow. And that's really what it's all about. Being nice, I mean, I tend to write the best music when I'm sort of in the zone, quite relaxed, not thinking about other things. It's difficult if you've got screaming kids and things like that, and, you know, the phone going all the time to have really good creative ideas. So you need to find, you know, where you write music, your space, in every sense, the word is important as well. So those things need to be thought through. But wherever you are, you know, you can almost do it on, you know, when you're just sort of walking about, you have a little idea for a thing, record that little idea into your phone, come back, work it out on a piano, work it out on a guitar. And then you can start to develop it. And that's really the important bit, which we're going to come on and talk about in a bit. So once you've got that basic, you start with a spark. Which might be, you know, a three note motif. It might be it might be something a chord progression, it might be, rhythmic idea, whatever, you then wrap the rest of it around it, and then you can start building it out into a piece of music. Okay? That's what we're going to do next. 3. Demonstration: Now is the time where I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and just spend 5 minutes writing a very quick tune. I just want to show you a very quick example of how you can build a very simple piece of music out of one little spark. Okay. So let's get logic up. We're going to start with what should we start with? Okay, I'm going to start with a melodic idea this time. Okay, something There's the basic melodic idea. Okay, so then I'm going to expand upon. Now, as soon as you play that, you're starting to think about harmonically, what is that? What's going on there? Is it, Have I got Let's press on with it. Okay, let's just go with that. Let's just go with it. Here we go. Got a report but Okay. Right. Let's add a piano part to that. Now Cord wise, if you BE FG, there's a chord which will go if we're in C, we can use C major. I'm now going to try and put some chords with this which go with the tune. As I say, don't worry about the detail at the moment. Okay, nice and simple. Now let's add a baseline to that. Or are going to be a smear? I have a very simple little beat to go with it. Rhythm. Okay. I can add an extra little layer of strings, maybe. Here we go. Then we'll add a baseline, then we're done. Wah. It doesn't always go according to plan. Here we go. One more time. Already, that's starting to sound like an idea. There's a very Let's get that synth sound up. Synth base. Let's just go in here. There's my synth base. It's quite powe, isn't it? I wonder if I need a different one. You know, you're always looking for wobble dub No, we're not going for a dub. Maybe a nd. Okay, that'll do. I like that. We need it just to be very simple. Three, four, And adding that little sort of syncopated baseline in there also might give it a bit of rhythmic identity as well. Let's do that one more time. Right. And there you have the basic musical idea. We start with a very simple stepwise tune melodic idea, which we then expand a little bit. We add a harmonic idea to it. We wrap the rhythmic stuff around. And then there is. I mean, it's tiny. You know, that's just the very part one. There's nothing going on, and it's a very, very simple piece of music. But then on that, you then work variations. You then kind of think, Okay, what can I do? How can I expand that into, you know, we're just doing what is it one, two, three, 4 bars. How am I going to expand that into a 16 bar section? And then what is the contrasting section, my chorus or my B section going to sound like. And then once I've got an A and a B, I can start thinking about, Okay, how am I going to arrange them differently so that the texture feels different from one to the other? And how is the structure going to work? So I build it into a three minute song. There you go. So I didn't expect you to be able to necessarily I mean, those of you who don't have much music theory may go, why did he do that? Don't worry about it. The idea was just to show you the process or one process which you can use in order to pair into writing a piece of music. Okay? See 4. Why Harmony Matters: Come to the second part of your lightning quick course. Now, we're going to start with the first of the five pillars, which is harmony. And I think in Western tonal music, pop music, orchestral film music, anything else, harmony is probably the most important element. It's because it sets the mood for the whole piece, the tonality for the whole piece, whether it's major or minor or whatever, whether it's more dissonant and unpredictable or whether it's fairly sort of predictable and you know where it's going to go. And also, harmony sort of speaks to melody and melody, speaks to harmony. So the two are absolutely linked together. If I let me give you a little example. So if, for example, we start with a simple chord progression, here we go. So when we're talking about chords, we're talking at the moment in very simple terms of simple diatonic chords. So if you're looking at a scale of C major, and you play we know it's one, three, and five, you're playing a C triad. That's cord one. Then there's Cord two, corre three, called four, called five, cord six, called seven, okay. The most common chords you're going to be using are Cord one. Called five, called four. And those so if we just start with those, Very straightforward chord progression, one, five, and four. And that already in your mind, I bet in your mind, you can start hearing little kind of Oh, yeah. I can sort of hear a little melody over the top, can you? Sing along. You're writing music already. Even if you're singing along in your head, you're writing music already. That's how the process goes. But the harmony, what you're thinking in your head in all probability, if you're you're thinking notes which go with those chords, Now, in its most basic form, we tend to take melody notes from the notes of the chord and the joining up notes. In other words, we take notes from one, three, and five, and then we can use that one and we can use that one, the joining notes. That starts to be the basis for both harmony and melody. So if you started with a melodic thing that already implies harmony. C CDE, then A F, you've always got harmonic choices. I mean, and that will color the way you write your music. So if you want to use less obvious chord progressions, one, three, six, four, That starts to become the foundation of the piece of music in many ways, because that's going to color the melody. It's going to color the emotional story you're telling us if you start if you started on a minor chord, it has a very different feel too if you start on a major chord. These are really basic chords. These are This is just, you know, messing around with what are called diatonic chords, Cords which you can make out of the notes of the scale. You know, we're not getting into more kind of exotic chords, like, you know, extended chords, ninth and 11th and things like that. And then there's other things you can do. Instead of having a straight triad, you can use a suspension which goes So instead of going CEG, it goes CFG or CDG. And that again, colors the whole piece of music completely differently. There's other things which you can do. I'm taking this is not a five minute course in harmony, but I'm just trying to give you some sense of the different ways you can play with harmony. An important thing when you are writing a piece of music, but most music will have a baseline. So it's not just going. Down here will be a a baseline going on, but the baseline doesn't to stick to the root doesn't have to stick to the bottom note of the chord. What I'm doing there is I'm using what are called inversions. So instead of putting there's a ord of C. Instead of going when I go to Cord five G, instead of putting the G down there, why don't I use that note, Middle note? That's an inversion. Then I can go down to the F and do the same thing I'm using. You see it gives it a different color, a whole different feeling when you do that, as opposed to just sticking to root position. So harmony is amongst the most basic and powerful tools which you have when you're writing music. So if we stick to diatonic chords, one, four and five are the most common and the ones you're going to be using most frequently. They're followed by chord Cord six. So if you're playing in C major, that's a chord of A minor. And then probably the next most common is cord two. So after Cord one, cord four and called five, you then look at Cord six, and then probably cord two as the next. The ones which are slightly out there and are not quite so common, you will bump into Cord three if you so in a key of C, that's E minor. The one which you're least likely to find is called seven, which is diminished chord, which is not used that commonly, particularly in sort of contemporary songwriting and things like that. Let's look at one or two really common chord progressions. And one of the most common is a lot of them come in sequences of four, which is also a limitation because it comes really predictable, but it's also quite straightforward to start with. And the most common is a sequence which starts on Cord one, then goes to Cord five, then goes to cord six, and then down to Cord four. You hear it all the time, all the time. You can work any number of variations on that. There's no rule which says you have to stick to one, five, six, four. You know, you can go one, four, three, And each of them will be sort of sparking something inside you, which you say, Oh, it's quite interesting. Maybe I'll give that a go. Maybe maybe I'll try that. So, the more chords you know, the more you know about harmony and the way in which these chords go together, the easier this part of the process is going to be. And while we're talking about harmony, we're talking about coming up with a chord progression, which then sparks the other parts of the writing sort of process. But obviously, it can work the other way around. If you've come up with a if you come up with a tune like that, you need to be able to work out what the chord's gonna be. And as it going that looks very much like a cord of G. Now, this is the other thing. You need to be able to develop a sort of good angel bad devil thing sitting on your shoulder, which tells you when notes sound wrong. It's not wrong wrong, but it's not right right either. And things like that. So even if you don't understand the music theory which lies behind this, you need to be able to use your musical intuition to hear when something's right and when something's wrong. And when something's wrong, you need to be able to dive in and work out. And what it normally means is, if there's a melodic line, which is not fitting with the harmonic line. So, in other words, if you've got a cord to C, any of those five notes is fine. That one there, A, the sixth can be fine, but you need to resolve it somehow. Likewise, the B normally has to resolve up. You can use that note there, the seventh note. That sound. That sounds fine, but notes to avoid that one. A semitone up or a half step up from the root of the cord is always going to sound a bit dodge. And likewise, that one there, the flat five augmented fourth, whatever that node there, semitone out from the top note of the chord. Sounds a bit weird. And likewise, if you're combining an E with a that can sound can sound good, but it can sound bad. So what I'm saying is, I mean, none of these things sound bad bad unless I mean, it's what you're trying to achieve. And you may want something which is much more, um, uh, exotic harmonically. And that's exactly the effect you're after. And in which pace, go for it. On the other hand, if you don't looking if something's off, then you look for notes which are a semitone different to one of the notes in the chord and look for one of these sort of sixth or seventh notes, which doesn't resolve properly, which just feels a bit out of place. Learning to identify that will really help you as you develop your writing. Look, this has been a bit of a whistle stop to put it mildly through how to how to put your harmonic progression together. But I mean, I hope this at least sparked sort of some thoughts you can have. Now, what we're going to go do next is write a piece of music and help you write a piece of music, as well, okay? Here it. 5. Chord Progressions Demonstration: Hello. What we're going to be doing in sections as we go through this little short course is I'll be writing a piece of music, and you'll be writing a piece of music. I'm now going to start by coming up with a chord progression, and that chord progression will be at the heart of what we do in my piece of music, and then you can come up with a chord progression, which will be the heart of what you do. Now I'm going to keep it to sort of fairly sort of fairly straightforward, but maybe not, you know, ridiculously straightforward. I'm going to stay in the key of C because it's easier for people with lesser music theory to follow what's going on. So Oh, quite like that. So we got that's called one. One, no, one, 15 no one. One, two, five. Okay, so it's going to go one, two, five. No. One, two, four. Second time round, it goes one, two, six. Then resolved with a 51 at the end. Okay, so what we got going there called one, you notice also how entwined rhythm is that you can't play chord progression without implying some rhythm. Repeat it. Okay. That is going to be our starting point. As we go on, it's quite possible that it will it might change, because let me change the tempo here. Okay, now we're diving into logic. So I'm going to slow it down to 100 beat per minute. 19. Dent ding ding ding, do. Do do do do ding Don Okay, 100. Let's stick with 100. Right. Let me just play M there is a 16 bar chord progression. We could add a little baseline to that. Let's see what happens. There, therefore, is the basis of our tune. So that is my tune. Well, that's the basis that's where it starts. I mean, it's very basic. It's chord progression. It's got some it's already got a rhythmic element in there, and it's sort of implying melodic elements as well. So it's gone from being a simple four chord loop. Being developed into something slightly more structural because actually, we've taken we haven't just gone for a four bar loop. We've got a sort of 60. So we got the first idea, the one, two, four. Then we repeat it, but vary it. So we go one, two, six. Then we go back to the first idea, one, two, four, then back to one, two, six, and then with a little tag on the end, five, There is the start of a musical idea. And we'll be coming back to that little musical idea in the next module, looking at melody. But now you 6. MinusOne: Your first chord progression: Okay, it's your turn to get stuck in now. This is a fairly straightforward little exercise, which we've got for you. You will find as part of your course materials, and they may be labeled differently to this because this is early days and we may have decided but basically, you have some assets. I've got a template a blank project for logic. It could just as be any other door. Set the tempo to 120 BPM, which is up here, which is what most doors default to. And then the first thing you want to do is you want to drag in this one -102.3 just drums. Okay? So we drag that in, keep the track format, create sto f. Yeah, that'll do. There we go. Right. And we put it at the beginning, and you'll hear a drum track going. So far, so good. Now, you add your chord progression. Now, you've got a choice of two types of chord progression. You've either got this one. Which is sort of slightly more classical and this one, which is just electric piano and bass. Okay, so let's go with this one to start with. What if you look at what it says here, oh, there we go. Right, let's just get that the shot. There we go. You've got Cords A one to seven. So this is called c two, core three, called four, five. So if we wanted to produce a cord sequence, which was 1564, for example, you just go and drag it in call one, drag that in festival, line it up with the beginning, call five, stick it there. Called six. Called for that. Now you'll get, suppose you want to find out what it'll sound like. Instead of five, you went to three. Let's take three and put three in there instead. And if you want to end the thing, that's why you've got these held chords. So we'll have a held chord one to end on, like that. And then we'll just chop off the rest of the drums. There we go. So now we have a little four bar tune. Simple as that. Knock yourself out. Go and have some fun. It's just a way, particularly for those of you who are not particularly fluent on a keyboard or something like that. It's just an easy way of messing about and seeing the different effects these different chords can have when you're building a chord progression. You don't have to stick to a four chord progression. You can have three, six, eight, whatever you like. I've kept it to C major and 120 BPM, so it's nice and straightforward. Oh. Okay, that is really weird. Okay. Big hands. Right, yeah. But this way, you can start building something, and if you are able to, you know, if you are fluent on a keyboard, then you can start building your own chord progressions and do your thing. If you're not, then you can use this, for example, as the basis for the melody bits and all the rest of it, which you're going on to talk about next. So that's how your minus one works. Go and have some fun. 7. What makes a great melody?: Everybody. Welcome back. We're going to venture into the world of melody now. Tuning writing is often what people think of when you say writing music. But obviously, lots of music doesn't have tunes or it doesn't have a fully fleshed out phrase by phrase tune, which has a sort of cohesive structure and all the rest of it might just simply be a motif, which is, you know, like the smallest indivisible unit of melody. It's like a just. There's a motif. The note motif. Another three note motif. Slightly more complicated motif, but still a motif. You can't divide it down into anything else. It's just a short series of notes, which can be enough by themselves. A lot of dance music, all you have is, like, a three note motif or two note motif, even so it doesn't necessarily mean to be then expanded and structured and put into what we would come to call a melody. But a lot of the time, that's what we do. And that's what we're going to be talking about in this. And that's what you're going to go on and do next. So how you go about writing melody is a little bit like harmony depends partly on how how much, if any, music theory you've got. But basically, all you need is two at ease, couple of ears, and, you know, a sense of what sounds right to you. So as I mentioned when we were talking about harmony, harmony and melody are absolutely joined at the hip, and the two are in conversation. So you might start writing a bit of a melody and then come up with a chord progression which works with it, and then that said, Oh, well, that's an interesting idea. Let's move the melody somewhere else, et cetera. So the two can sort of go like this together as you move forward and you produce something which is more interesting than what you had to start with. Okay, there's two ways you might approach this. You can come up with a motif first and then put the chords with it or you can start with the chords and then work out a motif which goes with that. Let's look at that second one first, because in some respects, if you have less music theory, it's easier. So to start with what notes are available to you, um Okay, this is sort of level one for people who haven't got a huge amount of music theory. So we've got a triad, a chord of C, all those notes in that triad are available to you. So you can go. That's all fine. It's going to work fine. You can also get away with the middling notes, the joining notes. Okay. So all those notes are available to you. Again, you have to be careful with things which are semitone off. Don't work particularly well, and just be careful with the six and seven. You can get away with it. But that doesn't always sound so good. So you've got to know a little bit more harmonically what you're up to before you get there. So what you've got is the notes of the triad and the joining notes. So what are we going to do with that? If we've got a 1564 going on, let's come up with a little motif. Okay, that's fine. And called C. Now, I can't just repeat it there because it's got a C and E in it, and G doesn't have any of those. I can do that because there's got a Gina D in it. There you have a tune. So here's the motif which works with the cord C because we've got CDE in it. We then go to Cuda G, core five. Then we go up to six, which also has a CNN E in it, so I can go back to my original motif. Then we're just walking it down to to cord four. So you see how we varying it, taking the same motif and moving it to a different key really important point, actually, is firstly, one of the reasons that works is I'm not going It's going It has rhythmic identity. And rhythmic identity really matters because if I'd just gone, it's kind of Mull, it's not, but it's not very exciting, really, is it? I mean, it's kind of does it call it tune? No, I'd call it three notes, may, actually. Uh, that's four notes. Well, my light. Okay. So you take once you've got that rhythmic thing going, I can then move it to the CordiG and you're still recognizing it, but you've transposed it. Then I go back to the a I put Cord six under it. The other important thing which comes out of this little example is how the chord which you put underneath the tune changes what the tune sounds like. So when I went it sounds very sort of vanilla chocolate box nursery rimf, but sounds completely different when I come back second time with an A minor under it. So there's lots of ways in which the harmony is almost giving identity to the melody. So think about this. How simple is that? I mean, I'm just going up and down a C major scale up to GM Bach. If I play, though, like this, Beauty and the Beast, okay? So it's a wonderful melodic line. But it's It could not be more simple. It's stepwise movement. You know, no big leaps, yeah, that's all fine. But it's the harmony, which gives it That's what gives it the identity. So this is when I'm talking about this conversation going on between melody and harmony, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. One of the most common problems I hear with people when they're writing, melodies of one description or another is they kind of not quite sure what the identity of that melody is. So It sort of wanders off, and you need to have a shape. If it's going to be more than just a motif. If it needs to have a shape, needs to beginning or middle end. And that often follows, there needs to be a harmonic progression which goes with that as well. So, for example, you're not just as I say, more often than not tunes back up where they started or on Cchord one. So But then it goes back and where it ends up, it ends up back firmly on chord one, we're talking tonal music. We're talking functional harmony, which all drives back to the home chord. In this case, C major. So when you're writing your tune, you need to think about the structure of the thing. You can hear where it's going, can't you? That was really not very good tune. But it doesn't matter. It still went out a little walk around the countryside and came back to the beginning and it still had its identity. Okay, that's better. Here's another thing about tune writing. Actually, writing music in general. Most pieces of music do not leap into the world fully formed as great pieces of music. What happens is they evolve like that did. I had a go. It was alright. I had another go. It was a bit better. Chip, chip chip chip chip. And so if you chip away at things, things will eventually things can only get better. Anyway, so I want you to bear these kind of principles in mind, find a motif, expand it. Be aware of the harmonic context of the tune. So if you're starting with chords, work out what notes are available. If you're starting with a tune, work out what chords that tune is describing to you or what chords are available to you. Just like when we were using a C and E, I could go for a chord of C, I could go for a quarter of A minor, et cetera. You can choose one or the other. It's memorability is down to repetition, but straight repetition is really dull, so you need variation. But never lose sight of what your central idea is. Make sure you if somebody says to you, okay, what's the motif at the heart of this tune? You can go, D, d, d, d, job done. So with that in mind, let's move on. I'll have a G to tune, then you're going to have a go to tune, okay? Be there or be square. 8. MinusOne: Writing a tune: Let's get down to writing a tune. Let me just go back to that chord progression which we had right at the very beginning. I may live to regret this. I really may live to regret this. What am I doing? Can't even get the keyboard up properly. Here we go. Let's get it into. There we are. You may remember the chord progression is one, two, four, one, two, six. Now, that's not set in stone, and as I said, conversation between the melody and harmony. But let's just So when I'm looking at my keyboard here, so I've got the notes I have to choose from. Then it goes to the D minor. What have I got there? So I'm going then I'm going to the F. So there's Cs available. I can go to that C because that's also part of A minor. So when I'm sitting here writing music, I'm seeing chords on the keyboard and imagining the notes and thinking to myself, what's available. Takes a while before you're able to do that. But you can just do it slowly. Or you start the other way around and start with the tune and then try and put the chords to it. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages. But I quite like that. So it goes somewhere different? The only thing which bothered me about that chord progression we did originally was it was a little bit too repetitious. So. A now I could go to Cord three. That works. So what I was doing That's quite nice. It's got that shape to it and it ends up on cord four. Cord two. Then I go up to A there for the A minor. Then rather than coming back to the C, I'd go to an E minor, but I use the same shape but transposed into a different key. Then back to call One again. It's a sort of epic anthem, really, isn't it, I suppose. So okay, that's how that tune would have worked out. Let's start with another tune and just start from the tune end this time. And it's going to be all model. Okay, let's try. That works. So we've got a very simple It's how it is at its most simple. So obviously, F. Then I just elaborate slightly on this second time round, so it's variation and repetition. So there is the conversation between chords and harmony and melody all happening at once. Called one called four. Then slight elaboration. Then I'm going up up to cord six. Same shape, but a different harmony. Then down to the G, I can either go to C or G or E minor. E minus sounds best because all three of them have G in it. And then bringing the whole thing back. To call one. So those are two Are they that different? Different ways of writing a tune using Melody first, harmony first, but really the two are in conversation all the time. Now it's going to be your go to add melody and to work on your own tune. So let's see how 9. The Importance of Rhythm: Hello, everybody. Number three, pillar number three, rhythm. Of course, we've already met it. The very moment we started, the moment I put my hands on the keyboard and went, There's rhythm inherent in that because I'm choosing how long to hold one chord, when to move to the next. You know, I mean, quite aside from when I go, there's rhythm in there. So you tend to think of rhythm as sort of big sort of block rocking beats and all that kind of thing. And that's, you know, an important part of it, particularly if you're, you know, in some types of music more than others. But yeah, that suddenly becomes a big front and center. So, oh, rhythm, yeah, it's got a big driving beat and it's sort whatever. But rhythm is there throughout absolutely everything. It's there inherent in melody. That has a rhythmic identity. If I just went, which is very straight, it still has rhythm because it's going one, two, three, four. Whereas I went that little clip, that little click at the end um, gives it a kind of identity. It makes it different to other tubes which go, et cetera. There's a lot too rhythm. It's not just about how the notes, chords, whatever else lines up with the grid. It's obviously there's tempo, how fast is it? Are we dealing with sort of drum and bass 170 BPM? Don't do dit dit, dit, dit? Or are we doing sort of sort of enigma variation it's something very, very slow. You know, is the tempo steady? You know, like a lot of electronic music or does it kind of does it breathe? Is it very rubato, which means stolen? In other words, you're not sticking straight to the grid, but you're letting the thing breathe and move. How many beats are there in a bar? How many beats are there in a group of notes? You know, Is it sort of nice and straightforward, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Or three. Or five, one, two, three, four, five, four, two, three, four, five. You know, there's all those kind of interesting asymmetric ones, you know, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three. So groups of seven, for example, it doesn't have to be straightforward. And somebody was commenting on one of the YouTube videos said, one of the about common failures in music is just seeing everything in blocks of four. And that's really true cause so often we end up with, you know, a four note phrases, you know, four bar chord loops and things like this. And it just sometimes predictable. One of the nice things is, you know, to throw things off a bit and have a bar of 24 or, you know, suddenly just not quite where you expect things. This is one of the most important elements actually rhythm is doing things which are slightly unexpected. Expect the unexpected. If you think of hello by Adele, She just anticipates it doesn't go one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. It goes one, two, three, four, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. It just anticipates. So it just throws you off. Hello? Yeah, et cetera. I'm not gonna do an Adele peste. Really? You'd like to see an Adele presage? No, I haven't got the wig. Can't do it. Sorry. So Rhythm is about the unexpected as much as it is about the expected, sometimes it's about playing with the two, and it's definitely not just about beats and percussion and ostinati those big string things and all that kind of stuff. It's about every aspect of the music. It's about how you build it into your harmonic movement like Adele. How do you build it into your melody, giving it that rhythmic identity. And and so it's it can make all the difference between something being a bit predictable and something which is a bit Oh. Let's go and do. Oh, shall we? See you in a minute. 10. Demonstration: Again. Right, let's crack into something. What I thought I'd do is I'm just going to start writing stuff, but actually give you know, with a bit of sort of rhythmic interest to it to try and sort of show the different ways in which we can use rhythm. So let's start with just Now, what we've got going on there, very simple single note, but it's got rhythmic interest. Why has it got rhythmic interest? Because, let me just get me track delay sorted out because it needs to come back a bit. That's right. If we look at it, the first okay, first three notes are on the beat, first four notes are on the beat, and then the next four notes are on the offbeat, so it's syncopated. Okay, now that works perfectly well, but it works even better if there's something which is on the beat for it to work against. Do you see how that as soon as you put something else with it, you start getting an interplay between these two because the offbeat is suddenly hitting a different note in this top one. So just doing something as simple as that has introduced some rhythmic interest there. And that's before we start doing weird and wacky stuff like putting these are all these are all straight. These are all dividing each beat is divided in two. So this is simple time. This is not compound time. But if you start adding in, obviously, you can divide a beat into two. So it goes one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, 123 4123 for 12, three, four. So you can divide it into two or four. But you can also divide it into three, 12, three, two, three, one, two, three, 123. And if you put threes against fours, you can get quite an interesting effect, as well. I don't know what's going to happen to you. Probably not best with all that delay on it, I think, probably, if I'm gonna try and make a point about rhythm. Yeah, I'd say so guy. I'd get rid of that. Whoa. Oh, dear. Okay. Hang on. Sorry. You're not looking at this. Actually, let me just change the sound out because I think this sound is not very helpful for this. Okay, I'll tell you what I'll go back to. One, two, three, four. I think, arguably, that's too much. Too many cross rhythms, too much going on. Pack up and go home. But okay, let me just quantize it in eight triplets. There we go. So we've got against There is rhythmic interest. Right there. Without having to do anything else, then we can add in our bonkers offbeat. So what you got is quite a lot of rhymic dentity going on in there. So it's there's three different things going on at once. And there's not a sort of big crashing beat anywhere. But you see how the rhythm playing with rhythm, playing with what you expect, which is throwing you off with the strings coming in being syncopated, coming in half beat early and putting triplets against what threes against twos, it just creates a sort of sense of interest. And interestingly, if you listen, let me just get up. Spice, which is a really good source of, you know, uh beats and stuff like that. Oh, no, that's not splice, is it? That's a synthesizer. Here's splice. Hello splice. Here, look, we've got a techno loop here, and you think techno must be about as straight as it gets four to the floor, which it sort of is. But listen to the number of times that clap just edges ahead of the beat, which that's what gives it life. Really, really interesting. The way that happens and you get this if it wasn't for that, it would be, you know, completely straight. But it's little things like that because it's not really prominent a lot of the time, and it doesn't have to be every you know, you could do 7 bars, which is completely straight and then just put that in the and go, Oh, that's interesting. All I'm saying is that if you're doing if you're playing with rhythm and you're listening to your piece of music, and it is somehow not lifting off and taking you to some new level, maybe you don't need to go back in and necessarily write a wonderfully more inventive chord sequence or melody. Maybe it's to do with your use of rhythm or lack of use of rhythm and trying to give it that little unpredictable twist, which might just kind of help it lift it into some other kind of, you know, level, so to speak. So one of the principal things which I'm trying to reinforce here is the most interesting thing about rhythm is when it's slightly unexpected, that just even with kind of an absolutely classic sort of dance beat where you're doing four to the floor, it's actually the elements of it, which are unexpected, which make it good. So if we take a drum which we've got here, it's, you know, perfectly standard kind of technoi kind of beat. But it's all those elements which are just not completely on the beat. Let me just adjust the tempo so it's the same as this. Then you can see it more clearly. Okay. It's the little elements in there. Here we go. If we open it up, then our big elements. Look, here we go. There's the grid. And you can see it's these little things, these little Karo, all that kind of stuff. Bing That's what's giving its character. There's more examples I got here. Here we go. Look. If we look at this fella here. Hello, chap, how are you? I'm fine. Thanks very much, Gore. Nice of you to ask, actually. It's right. My pleasure here, me. Right. Okay. Let's adjust the tempo to and see what he's got to say for himself. Great, sounds on the surface of it is a very straightforward beat, boom, boom, chick, boom, boom. But then it's off. Look, here's the beat. And these are all on the offbeat. Look, they're all over the shop. Well, they're not all over the shop. They're very nicely aligned, but they're not where you'd expect it to be. They're not on the down. That's what makes it interesting. So one other aspect of this, which is quite important is whether it's whether you're looking at things in simple time, in other words, where it can be divided into twos and fours and sixteens or whether you're looking at it in compat, where it's divided into threes. Now, the two come together in a concept called swing, which you may be familiar with. But again, it's another thing which can really drive your music and give it all kinds of life. Swing is when you start moving. Well, there's a lot of parts of it, but a big part of it is when you start moving your notes towards the triplet and away from the straight, quarters, eighth and 16th. But you don't have to go all in one go. It doesn't have to be just all in threes or all in twos and fours. It can be a gradual thing. And as you gradually move it, the effect can be really interesting. So here is a very simple little drum loop, which is kind of very much in fours and eights. Ooh, not that one. Okay. Now, let us start applying some swing to this. Hear that? It's getting closer and closer to three, isn't it? Now it's completely threes, almost. Back to 16 again. So that's 100% straight. And then what I was doing is gradually introducing the swing. Whoa. And there, if you look at it, you can see it do do Don Don, d Dun, d dun. So that's how swing works. It's a really important part of an awful lot of contemporary music, but it's not just contemporary music. I mean, all music. And actually, once again, the interesting bit is mixing up the, you know, the straight and so the straight fours and eights and the threes because that's where you get this kind of interesting cross play. So the point I've been trying to make here have I been making it? You tell me. There's more to rhythm than just programming beats. And even if you are programming beats, there's more to making the thing interesting than just sort of sticking to straight four to the floor. It's all the elements which are not four to the floor, which make it really cool. And that rhythm is so much more than just beats and ostinati. It's about harmonic rhythm, melodic rhythm, all that kind of thing. So I'm really going to be interested to hear how you interpret those thoughts when you come to write your piece of music. Yeah, let's see how that. 11. MinusONE: Rhythmic Interest: Hello, every Waddy. For your minus one in this module, Damn I just thought I'd mix it up a bit. Woo. And so I'm giving you something slightly different to what we've done before. So I'm giving you a little piece, little piece, it's sort of a piece, which consists of a number of elements, all of which have rhythmic interest, and you can decide which to keep and which to jettison. So there's a string bit. Very straight. All eights. Okay. Just goes on like that. There's that. Then there's a piano piece, which also starts same kind of way. Then it goes. And then there's electric piano and electric bass, which have sort of a little chord progression which goes a bit like this. Okay. And when you play the whole thing together, it's the way they play with each other, so it goes like this. Now, you know, you can use whatever you like or whatever you don't like. You can just get rid of anything. Anything you don't like, get rid of it. Um, whatever was a dodgy name? So, your mission, should you choose to accept it, um, is to add stuff to that which plays with the rhythm. It can be if you want to do a little beat, dig dig, you can do one of those. You can put some triplets against something. You can find some elements. I've given you the three basic stems, the well it bass chords, the piano and the strings, and you can do what you like with it and just use it as a jumping off point to find your own way of developing some rhythmic interest here and add it to it. It's, again, very straightforward 120 BPM, and there's a little I know harmonically, it's a little bit more complicated than some of the other things we've done. But basically, go for it, have fun and see what you come up with. Good luck. 12. What Is Texture?: Hello, everybody. And so we move on to I think one of the more mysterious ones. Texture. The trouble with texture in a way is it means different things to different people. And We sort of know what you mean by text. Yeah, how do you pin it down? Okay, look, there's a technical definition of it, which includes things like, okay, monophonic, homophonic, polyphonic and heterophonic. In other words, monophonic is, as you can imagine, a solo line of instrument, Oh, of melody or whatever. Homophonic is when you're largely working with block chords or it's sometimes including tune and accompaniment, simple tune and accompaniment. Polyphonic is when you get those interweaving lines of music, you know, that kind of feeling that everything that's a rolling river of sound thing. Hetrophonic is probably the least common, and it's where you get sort of two instruments playing the same tune, sort of, but one's playing a slightly different tune to the other one. Does that make any sense? Here, I know how I can show you how this all works because I've written a little piece of music, and it goes like this. Monophonic, okay? Solo instrument. What more is there to it? Let's have homophonic. Lock chords. Theme and accompaniment. Get ready for polyphonic. Different weaving textures. And finally, There you go. I quite like that. I was quite pleased with that. Okay, look, all that aside, we look this is the difference between sort of the music theory, more academic approach, which is that and the, I'm trying to write a piece of music approach, which is what we are, yeah. And so when we're talking about texture, what are we talking about? We're talking about density. We're talking about, you know, how much stuff is going on in there, how many lines of music are going on. We're talking about range. You know, is it very confined? Is it, you know, is it very big? We're talking about the palette of sounds and arrangement. You know, are we using answering voices? We're talking about, you know, rhythmic intensity. You know, I it just sort of sort of big what session musicians call what is it footballs? In other words, is it long lines of semibreves or whole notes? Or is it kind of Ostinato with lots of 16th notes rushing about all over the shop? No, it's all that kind of stuff. And so I'm taking a very broad view of what texture is. But in many respects, texture is often the essence of your musical character. It's more than just the palette of sounds you choose. And whilst your musical personality will be written all over your melodies and harmony and your approach to rhythm, Texture is a really important one, and when it comes to establishing a personal style, you need an approach to this. So rather than talk about it endlessly, which isn't that useful, I'm going to take a simple tune and then work some sort of almost like some little theme and variations very quickly. So you can start to see what I mean by texture, and then you can take that idea forward and apply it to your own music. Okay? Let's do it. 13. Demonstration: Come back. Let us crack into this little tune I've written up here, and then we're going to look at it from a textual point of view and see what we can do with it. Here it goes. Okay, very simple. Wow. Let's now start by rearranging it. Okay. Oh, let's have some click on. Um, right, I'm going to start by putting a sort of basic string ostinato underneath. Okay. That was exciting, wasn't it? I hope you're not all falling off your chairs with excitement at that because well, okay, so now we gonna have a top line? Okay, that'll do for now for this little variation. Okay, let's go into here and add another little string layer to it. What shall we put on this one? Should we go pits? Shall we This is all going a bit orchestral. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. We do another variation, which is not orchestral. Okay, on stupid go. What is the kid I'm doing I am doing what I tell you not to do, which is forget what the chord progression is. Right. DC Okay. Sorry about that. Well, where were we? Right, here we go. Back to the beginning. Right, one, two, three. Let's crack into this with some absolutely amazing pizzicato. Okay, that you're starting to get the gist of how textually this is very different to where we started. We can make this more polyphonic with an answering phrase. That was nasty. The answering phrase is right, so we can keep that. Okay, so look, there is one example. Okay, let's move on to do another one. You know, that's one way we could textually change this. Right. What are we going to do now? We're gonna have, we're going to go Ah, come on, Guy. Come on, Guy. Get that click going. Right. Here we go. Okay, there we go. So now we can add. Okay. Or whatever. Okay, so you can start to see how this is sounding different to what we had before. Okay, let's get in there and have some trim strings. That's interesting little texture, which I like. Okay. So we've got some Okay, do you hear that? Well, you can hear it's different, but this is treating the material in a different way with a different texture. Now, we could. Okay, let's let's add some let's try We haven't done a drummi version with. Always forgetting the metrolom. Right. Let's see what we can do with this. Okay. Very simple. This one's going to be. So we're going to Okay. So this is more homophonic because it's got less it's not so much lines moving around. I'd like a bit of reverb on that. Absolutely honest. Let's have a bit of reverb. Uh So it's simple. It's not dense. I mean, I can make any of these others. You can, I think I made the point really. I mean, that every time you arrange something, if you're changing the palette of sounds, if you're changing the speed and intensity of the music, you're changing the texture. So let's just play through these one last time and just to sort of talk about so this isn't the sort of definitive guide to texture, but you start to get some idea of how this works. So here is the original idea. Basically, Thebe accompaniment. Now, a bit more bit more rhythmic density and pace and polyphonic line. Then I lost interest at the end. Then we got this one. Me floaty Oh. There you go. So look, this is a very quick sort of example, but I could go on all day. But I'd think it'd be better if you went on all day. Well, not all day. But what I'd like you to do is to try this. Take a simple theme and see how many, different ways you can arrange it, different densities, different pace, different textures, because there's many more variations we could have tried with this. We would have changed the tempo, we could make it much more rubato, so it wasn't sticking so closely to the clique. We could do all kinds of things. But it's your imagination I'm interested in. Let's see what you got. 14. MinusONE: Texture: I said it was your turn, and this is what I mean. What I've given you here is a very simple little, slightly Keltiy kind of tune. And I've given it to you. You've got audiophile and a midi file of both the top line and the accompaniment and a list of the chords. So it's slightly Celtic. There it is. Simple as that. And what you're going to do now is use that as the basis for working your own theme of variations. How can you change the texture of that? I want to hear some slamming hip hop. I want to hear some screaming metal. I want to hear a solo voice. I want to hear you know, whatever. Whatever floats your boat, basically. But what I want you to think about is texture. So that's why I've given you kind of relative you don't have to stick to my harmonization there. You can use your own chord. Look, you can do your own thing. You can come up with your own little theme and work its variations. But the focus of this exercise is texture is texture, palace sounds, arrangements, density, speed, all those kind of things, yeah? So go get them. 15. Structure and Form: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the last part of your course, your rapid immersion program in how to write music. In this last section, we're going to be looking at structure and form and structure and form provides the answer to one of the most commonly asked questions. And that is, how come I can write a perfectly nice eight bar or 16 bar piece of music. But then it just peters out, and I have no idea how to turn it into a three minute piece. That is the question I'm going to be answering. Oh. Okay. Now, Part of the answer is, you're going to need more than just one idea. I mean, there is a structure and form. There is a musical structure, which literally just use one idea which you repeat over and over again called strophic form. This is I have to tell you this is one of these rabbit hole type parts of the world. If you're an academic bent, you can go down into structure and form and spend your entire life pulling pieces of music apart. But we're not interested in doing that. We are here to write music, not to pull it apart. So let me just show you the shortcoming of strophic form where you just repeat the same idea over again. Again, I've written a really, really simple four bar piece of music, and piece of music is being very generous to it. But I'm only writing 4 bars so that we can rapidly get through the kind of um the little idea so you can hear the structure in microcosm. In in real true life, you probably would have a section of music which might be 16 bars long. So actually, the whole thing would last long, but you'd go to sleep and be bore before I got to the end. So we're going to use four bar. So here is strophic form in all its glory. Okay, nice idea, yeah. Yep, that's doing it for me. Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. We've heard this before, haven't we? Yeah, okay. Yeah, nice. Okay. Right. What's next? Hang on. You see the problem. You can't just repeat the same thing over and over again. So one of the answers to that question, how can I have a three minute piece of music is you need more than one idea. Oh, okay. It can be related. It needs to be related. You can't suddenly fly in some other piece of music from Planet Zog or something. It needs to be a variation on the main theme. So it's different chords, different top line, different whatever. But you can't change everything. We'll come and talk about that in a moment. But first, I want to show you the next variant on this epic thematic odyssey and that is called binary form where we use which each of these blocks, the first idea, we're going to call A. This new idea, we're going to call B. The structure here is A A B, B, and it's known as binary form, and this is what it sounds like. You're gonna get bore of this tune. I'll tell you that. One more time. Come on, give us something else. Ah huh. Yep. Okay. That is definitely an improvement on the first one, but only just. The other thing about these structures and forms, and we'll look at a couple more before we move on, is just because you're repeating the thematic material like A, A, B, B or A, B, A, B, whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that everything else has to say the same as well, because you might have a song form where you have intro verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, outtro. It doesn't mean every verse is going to sound exactly the same or every chorus is going to sound exactly the same. There may be a different thing going on as well. There may be when you come to the second chorus, the vocal get doubled in an octave or something. There could be a different dynamic of structure form, which is growing over the course of the whole piece. Is superimposed on the top of the ABA type form. So other things can change. You don't have to be stuck just in the same old thing. So here, let's try. Let's try this one, A, B, then we'll have A. Then we'll have C. Whoa. Then we'll go back to A again. This is a form called Rondo form, AB, AC. So it's getting closer to what songs sound like. Oh, I apologize. We're doing this tune again. New idea. Okay. Yep. I've heard that somewhere before. Where have I heard it before? You knew the idea. Okay, there we go. There's the sea idea. Oh, come on. Let's get our old friend back. There we go. So you see how that it does work, doesn't it? And this could not be more simple. You know, it's drums, bass guitar. That's about it, really, isn't it? Have I got piano in there. I mean, there's nothing to it. So okay, how does this translate into your world? Well, you need to first of all, let's fast forward to the next bit, which she's talking about. Let's get rid of our little friends down here. So here's our basic idea. Right. What we're going to do to start with is we need an intro. So we're going to have something which is similar to that and draws on the material in there, but it is not the same as that. So here we go. Let's Let's get in here, chop up our high hat, I mean, our ride symbol, for example. I'm going to do this all in microcosm. No, no, no, no, start back here. Okay. Let's hello, sorry, let's deselect them. Let's get those A, move these down. Here we go move them down a bit. So now we can come in with something That was appalling. Never mind. Right, that's right. Now, that could be a little intro. And then we go into the piano and the bass, and we keep these drums going. We're not bringing everything in yet. This is one mistake people make that just because they've got everything, they think, Oh, I'm gonna bring it in immediately. No, bring it in bits. Okay. So what we've got going on now, let's move this back a bit. See, I'm using these blocks and I'm just chopping them up and moving them about. So what we can do is we have I think that's going to sound better. That particular block is going to sound better if I transpose it up octave. Up you go. So then when we first introduce Intro, drawing on the same material, but different. Who Oh dear. Sorry. Go on. I transposed it wrong. There we go. Okay. Now we're going to duplicate that and now we take it down an octave. So it's now down to its original pitch. So there is a gradual growth going on within the piece. But this is our A section. Piano down an octave. Right. Now, we might go to the B idea. Whoops, so Daisy. Then when we come back to the A idea. Right. Again, all these are in microform. We're not doing okay. Move that back as well. Right now, so we got an intro. Right. Now we can bring the bass in. What is making that weird noise? Ah, that's what's making that weird noise. There we go. There. Now we can bring all that stuff in now we can go back to the piano. And now we can get the tune back in from the first one. So now we've got Shortly, actually. Back away, but with everybody in this time. Okay, so now we're repeating a lot of the material, but we are varying it to some degree. So it's actually giving us a bit of shape to the structure of the piece. It's peace. Did I say peace? It's not really a piece. It's the world's most simple thing. Okay. There we go. Okay, let's just listen from the top and you'll start to get the gist of how this might work. Intro. Interesting idea. A. Repeat it, but just a slight variation, piano down and octave. Now the B idea. Now, a idea. But it's not the same A idea. It's a different arrangement. Texture involving. Right. I hope that you're getting to just I mean, I don't need to labor the point and apart from anything else, that's enough of one tiny, tiny little tune. If you're actually working with, you know, good material, which this isn't really. But if you need lots of ideas, so you can feed them in gently and you can work these variations on the idea so that you can start to see how you can take your initial idea and then come up with a variation on that idea that's similar but different, and it can't be totally different. You can't just come in, as I say, flying in from Planet Zog. So you can change the chord progression. You can change the top line, but you wouldn't change that and the instrumentation all at the same time because it would just sound too different. So when you go to a B theme or a C theme, you need continuity and difference. So you need some things which are the same and some things which are different, and then they'll blend together well. And then you need to plan things out so that you're actually when you're looking at your sequence, you can see it. Okay, we start with a little intro. You can see how it's getting sort of thicker and richer as it goes on, and then you can put little markers in. A lot of people do that with songs in particular, intro verse, you know, verse one, pre chorus, chorus, all that kind of stuff. But so the solution to the structural problem of how do I get to 3.5 minutes is planning and coming up with more than one idea. Once you've got more than one idea, which is related to the first idea and preferably a C idea as well. But then you can use something from the CID idea as part of the intro, et cetera. So you've got thematic blocks, but then you've got a different arc which goes for the texture maybe. Lots of interesting ideas. Now, you need to go and apply this to your music. And I would start with something as simple as this. It doesn't have to be as kind of banal as this, but try and work with some really simple ideas. Don't try and work this structure thing with big complicated arrangement, big complicated production. Get your head around how the bit works, first of all, whatever your tune is, that's your A block. Now go away and come up with a B and a C, work out a structure, and then work out in terms of texture. Remember last module, how are you going to grow that? How are you going to give it a shape so that the texture develops over the course of the piece and reaches a peak and then pulls back. That's your challenge. Go. 16. Wrap-Up: So we come to the end. Thank you very much, indeed, for your company throughout this course. I hope you've written some great music and you'll go on and write even greater music. But this is only the first stage. You know, a lot of what we're covering here is fairly fundamental. But fundamental doesn't mean simple. Some of the great pieces of music what people are doing is they're doing these fundamental things which we've been talking about in this course, just exceptionally well. There isn't a sort of a natural sliding scale where things get better and also get far more complicated. There, you know, this is what writing music is about. Now there's lots of different ways of doing it, and we have many other courses which will help you grow as a songwriter, composer, whatever. You may well find diving into more music theory. Is a great thing to do. Or you may want to take how to write music even further and some more advanced stuff. But we got lots of genre specific things as well to do with film games, television, songs, music production, and using different bits of software and all that kind of thing. So there is a lot out there, which I hope you will consider. And yeah, check us out. Check us out. Check us out, check out our other courses, and we'll be delighted to have your company one more time. So thank you very much, indeed, and goodbye.