Music Theory for Electronic Musicians 5: Structure | J. Anthony Allen | Skillshare
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Music Theory for Electronic Musicians 5: Structure

teacher avatar J. Anthony Allen, Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      4:35

    • 2.

      Tools You Will Need

      1:24

    • 3.

      How to Use This Class

      1:23

    • 4.

      What is Form?

      5:05

    • 5.

      Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Break, Drop, Etc...

      3:27

    • 6.

      Using Letter Names

      4:57

    • 7.

      Analysis No. 1

      5:47

    • 8.

      Analysis Detail

      4:09

    • 9.

      Taking a Step Back

      3:58

    • 10.

      Analysis No. 2

      3:27

    • 11.

      Analysis Detail

      5:43

    • 12.

      Taking a Step Back

      3:41

    • 13.

      Binary Form

      4:24

    • 14.

      Ternary Form

      3:06

    • 15.

      Rondo

      2:56

    • 16.

      Theme and Variation

      2:33

    • 17.

      Other Forms (My Secret Weapon...)

      3:56

    • 18.

      How To Use These In Your Tracks

      3:06

    • 19.

      What Makes Sections Sound Different?

      1:52

    • 20.

      Volume

      8:59

    • 21.

      Harmony

      5:42

    • 22.

      Density (Texture)

      3:37

    • 23.

      Instrumentation

      3:38

    • 24.

      Absence of Something

      3:41

    • 25.

      Applying these Techniques in your Music

      6:10

    • 26.

      Making New Sections in a Track

      1:56

    • 27.

      The Science of Melody

      2:04

    • 28.

      Defining a Phrase

      4:49

    • 29.

      Phrasing in Hey "John"

      2:26

    • 30.

      Finding Phrases

      7:07

    • 31.

      Definition of a Motive

      3:51

    • 32.

      Finding Motives

      6:31

    • 33.

      Motive Alterations

      3:06

    • 34.

      Motive Mode Change

      2:41

    • 35.

      Motive Inversion

      5:13

    • 36.

      Motive Transposition

      1:51

    • 37.

      Motive Augmentation and Diminution

      3:09

    • 38.

      Motive Extension and Truncation

      3:45

    • 39.

      Motive Fragmentation

      2:09

    • 40.

      Combining Transformational Techniques

      2:57

    • 41.

      What Comes Next?

      1:27

    • 42.

      Thanks for Watching!

      0:40

    • 43.

      Bonus Lecture

      0:36

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About This Class

I like to think of this class as the "antidote for writers-block."
What we are going to do in this class is look closely at form and structure. That means we will be spending time diving into the whole track, and it looking at how it flows between sections, why it flows between sections, and how we can make that happen in our own tracks. So dust off some of those old sessions that you've been able to finish because this class is going to give you the tools you need to get those done.

If Your Music is Missing Something, This is Probably It.

If you are finding that you are writing track after track, and while they sound good, there is something they are missing - then this it. You are missing the sense of harmony that professional producers have. In this class, I'll arm you with all the tools you need to produce those tracks just like you imagine them.

Who should take this course?  
Anyone interested in producing their own music. This will get you up and running and give your tracks a unique sound in no time.

Structure 
This course consists of video lectures, which all contain a session in Ableton Live 10. If you are using a different program (or none at all), no worries! This isn't a class on how to use Ableton Live, and the concepts can be applied to any DAW.

Topics include:

  • Form

  • Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Break, Drop, etc.

  • Analysis Sections

  • Using Standard Forms

  • Binary Form

  • Ternary Form

  • Rondo Form

  • Theme and Variation

  • My Secret-Weapon Form (top secret!)

  • Techniques for Creating Variety

  • Density and Texture in Form

  • Melody and Phrases

  • The Science of Melody

  • Motive Alteration Techniques

  • ... And much more!!!

The course is a roadmap to finding the missing piece in your tracks, or just getting started making great tracks.

All the tools you need to make, produce, and start your music career are included in this course, and the entire course is based on real-life experiences - not just academic theory.

Praise for Courses by Jason Allen:

⇢  "It seems like every little detail is being covered in an extremely simple fashion. The learning process becomes relaxed and allows complex concepts to get absorbed easily. My only regret is not taking this course earlier." - M. Shah

⇢  "Great for everyone without any knowledge so far. I bought all three parts... It's the best investment in leveling up my skills so far.." - Z. Palce

⇢  "Excellent explanations! No more or less than what is needed." - A. Tóth

⇢  "VERY COOL. I've waited for years to see a good video course, now I don't have to wait anymore. Thank You!" - Jeffrey Koury

  "I am learning LOTS! And I really like having the worksheets!" - A. Deichsel

⇢  "The basics explained very clearly - loads of really useful tips!" - J. Pook

⇢  "Jason is really quick and great with questions, always a great resource for an online class!" M. Smith

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

J. Anthony Allen

Music Producer, Composer, PhD, Professor

Teacher

Dr. J. Anthony Allen is a distinguished composer, producer, educator, and innovator whose multifaceted career spans various musical disciplines. Born in Michigan and based in Minneapolis, Dr. Allen has composed orchestral works, produced acclaimed dance music, and through his entrepreneurship projects, he has educated over a million students worldwide in music theory and electronic music production.

Dr. Allen's musical influence is global, with compositions performed across Europe, North America, and Asia. His versatility is evident in works ranging from Minnesota Orchestra performances to Netflix soundtracks. Beyond creation, Dr. Allen is committed to revolutionizing music education for the 21st century. In 2011, he founded Slam Academy, an electronic music school aimed... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to music theory for electronic musicians Part five. In this class, we're going to focus on structure. Now, structure can also be thought of as the ultimate cure for writer's block. I've been hearing from a ton of students that are saying, I'm working on a track, and I'm stuck, and I can't finish a track, or I can't come up with another section. I can't figure out what to do next. That is what this class is going to address all of those issues. Going to analyze some tunes. We're going to look at when we're here in a song, what comes next. So we're not going to look so much at harmony, although harmony and chords and things will play a role in that because we have to decide what to do with our harmony, and that's one option that we can consider is how to change up our harmony. But it also has to do with texture and style and even the beat. There's all kinds of elements to it. So what I'm going to do is walk you through how we think about form and structure. In a tune, I'm going to tell you my tricks for coming up with a plan and then sticking to that plan or decidedly not sticking to that plan and going somewhere totally different. Those are both good options. This is all an element in music theory. Form and structure is something that you always study in music theory, whether it's traditional music theory or not. So this is kind of a whole new can of worms, but I've adapted it for this music theory for electronic music producers format. And I think it's really going to help all of you that are having trouble finishing a track, coming up with new tracks. And even if you aren't one of those people that's having trouble coming up with stuff, this is a great class to examine how you're making tracks and how other people make tracks so that you can maybe achieve a certain sound that you've been looking for. So, that being said, please jump in. Let's get started. Forms that people have been using for hundreds of years. Some of these are the most basic kind of forms. Some of them are a little more complicated. But what I really like about them is that there's a reason these have been around for hundreds of years. Like, they work. And it doesn't the genre doesn't matter. Like, yes, Mozart used this same form in his piece or, you know, in a symphony or something like that. But you can use it in a techno track, and it's going to work. Like, this is just how humans like to hear things. They like to hear things in certain patterns, right? We like to hear something, and then Okay, the next thing, the next kind of parameter that I would look at is density. And another way to think about this is texture. So with density, what I mean is how much that's happening. Imagine that waveform. That waveform is nice and thick. Can I thin it out without affecting the? So far, in this class, we've been talking about form and structure as it applies to the whole track. Now I want to zoom in a little bit and talk about form and structure as it applies to a melody. Now, 2. Tools You Will Need: Alright. Part five, here we go. Tools you will need. So in this class, you're going to want some kind of DA. It doesn't matter which one. I'm going to be using Ableton, but really, you can use whatever you want. Totally doesn't matter. This class is going to be a little bit different than the other classes in this series in that we're not going to spend a lot of time on harmony. We're going to spend more time on form and structure. This is something I've heard from a lot of people in the Q&A that they really want me to cover. So Um, we won't be spending a ton of time on the Mi grid like we have in the other classes in this series, although a little bit. We're going to be looking at some waveforms, though. So having a program up and running would be a good idea. Also, you might want to use I am going to use, I think, audacity a little bit in this class. That's like a free program looks at one big waveform. Don't really need it, but that is the program I'm going to be using a little bit just to look at some waveforms. Otherwise, I think that's it. You should be good to go with tools you already have. Okay, let's jump into another section, and let's talk a little bit about how to use this class. 3. How to Use This Class: Okay, what I want you to be doing in this class, while you're learning these techniques that I'm going to be talking about is thinking about how you can apply them to your own music. That's the most important thing. So we're going to do a good amount of analysis in this class, but it's going to be structural analysis, not harmonic analysis. Structural analysis is actually much easier, and you can do it by ear pretty quick. So when I do analysis projects, when I look at a track and say, Here's the structure, what I want you to be able to do is not you don't need to memorize the structure of tracks. That's not important. What's important is that you memorize how to find the structure of tracks so that you can listen to any track and say, I really love the way they go from this section to this section. What did they do that makes that work? And then you can do a quick little analysis of it. You can see how it works, and then you can say, that's what I want to do in my track. So the important thing is in memorizing who does what in their tracks. The important thing is to memorize how to figure it out so that when you're listening to tracks and you hear something you really like, you can seize that thing and use it in your own tracks. Cool. So keep that in mind. 4. What is Form?: Okay, so structure. Here's what we're talking about. We're talking about a term more commonly used in music theory aspects as form. So form and structure and structure mean the same thing, really. Structure is a term that we see more being used in kind of electronic music, but I'm probably going to say form more than anything because when I learned all this stuff, I learned the term form. Same thing. Same thing. So when we talk about this, what we're really talking about is sections of a tune, and what makes it feel like we moved from one section to another. When should those sections change? When should we have a change in section? And what kind of story can we tell by adding a change in section, right? So on the one hand, you can see form fairly easily if you just look at a waveform, right? Like, here's this track. Let's try to get the whole thing there. Okay. So here's an entire track. You can pretty easily see one, two, three, four, five different things, maybe more, right? We can see this is a kind of music. We can see this is a kind of music. We can see this is a kind of music. We can see this is a kind of music, and we can see there's something extra here. Okay. So we can go a little deeper with that and we could say stands to reason that this kind of music is probably related to this kind of music in some way, right? This music is probably related to this music. And this music probably is really similar to this music, but especially this music. I can tell that just by the waveforms, right? You don't need to know anything about music theory to know this. You need to know a little bit about pictures, right? This stuff looks similar to this stuff. We could go deeper still and say, in all of this stuff, I kind of see three different things in this stuff. I see something here, and I see a little break right there. Right? There's something different right there and same thing right there. There's a little break in it. Now, that's a really interesting clue as to what's going on because I see the same thing over here, although slightly different. This first one should be right about there, and there is a little break there, but it's smaller and different. Okay? This break is probably this one. So this chunk of stuff is probably really similar to this chunk of stuff. This chunk of stuff is probably really similar to this chunk of stuff. And all of this is similar to this. Probably. We really need to listen to it to know. I'm just saying first glances. First glances. Now, I know that the sections I highlighted and said, these are similar to this, for example, they're different lengths, right? And that's totally okay. We'll talk about that shortly. For example, this one looks to be twice as long as this. Which is a totally normal thing to do with form is to take a section. The first time we do it, I'm going to do it twice. The second time, I'm just going to do it once. It's totally okay. Those are the kinds of decisions that we're talking about in this section or in this class, actually. So we want to look at what's happening and why it's happening and what exactly is different between this section and this section, for example, so that when you're working on your tracks, you can say, Okay, I'm in this kind of a section. We're grooven, we're full on. How can I make something different in order to extend this track out longer, right? Because if I just do this groove for 5 minutes, it's going to feel stale. I need something different to keep things moving forward. That's what we're talking about here. Okay, uh, next, let's go into a little bit of lingo. And then we'll shortly, roll hear this tune and do some analysis. Don't worry. 5. Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Break, Drop, Etc...: Okay, so when we look at a tune, words that you're probably familiar with that we would use to talk about the structure of a song or a tune or a track or whatever, there are some that are probably familiar. Verse chorus, bridge, those are pretty standard terms. But they have a problem. So let me just kind of walk through this. Let's say this is our intro. Let's say this is our verse Well, let's say, just hypothetically, this is our verse, and this is our chorus. Okay? This is a bridge, and then we get another verse, another verse there, and another chorus, okay? Another chorus. And then in some kind of outtro Alright, that works. So basically, let's slice that down to just two things I want to look at. Let's call this our verse and this our chorus. Those terms, verse and chorus are a little arbitrary, right? Have you ever heard a song that had a verse that turns into the chorus? Like, you thought it was a verse, and then, like, they do it again and again and again, and you're like, Oh, that's the chorus. Maybe you don't think about music like that, but I do. It's actually very common. So what I might call the verse, someone else might call a chorus, what I hear a a chorus, someone else might hear is a verse. Um happen. Also, when I said, This is the intro and this is the bridge, those terms have problems too. The problem is, that doesn't really tell me. That makes it sound like they're two totally different things, right? And I don't think, in this case, these are totally different things. I think they're different, but I think they're related. So I really want a term that says, This is a thing, this is a variation on that thing. That's what I'd rather have. Rather than saying, This is the intro and this is the bridge. So you can call these intro and bridge and verse and chorus. You're welcome to do that. But when it comes to analyzing the structure, we're going to use a little bit different terms. Similarly, if we get into more kind of electronic music centric terms, things like the break, the drop, stuff like that. Those have the same problems. They're somewhat opinionated and they don't exist in all tracks, right? Not all tracks have a break, not all tracks have a drop. This one, for example, has, I guess what we would call a drop, it has a spot where the beat enters, but it's pretty weak drop. It's not really like a, you know, kind of thing. So so luckily for us, we have some other terms that we're going to use, and these are actually fairly easy to understand. So let's go to a new video and talk about the lingo we're going to use to analyze these kinds of projects. 6. Using Letter Names: Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're going to use a series of letters for this. Now, we're going to use ABCDEF, as many as we need up the alphabet, G H O, whatever. Very important. These letters have nothing to do with pitch, okay? These are not pitches. These are just the alphabet, okay? It's a little confusing that we use letters for this when there are also letters being used to talk about pitch. So normally for this, when we're talking about form and structure, we use big, big, big capital letters and nothing else. So don't think of these as pitch. We're talking about structure. Okay, so what we do with these letters is we use them sequentially. So we say, This first chunk of stuff here, I'm going to call this A because it's the first thing that happens. Okay? Oops. I don't want that. This next chunk of stuff, I'm going to call B because it's the next thing that happens. Let's call if we want to call this something different, we would call that C. Okay. Now, let's get to this part. This looks different, so I would call it D. However, it also looks similar to this in some ways. I think these are related, and we'll do an analysis of this track in the next video, so we'll get to the answer to that. If these are related, I could say, Well, this is A again. I don't think it is A again, right? I think this is like A, but I think it's different. So what I would do is I would call it a apostrophe. Okay? We would pronounce that A prime. Okay? This means A prime, and it means a different. Okay? A variation on A. Okay? So keeping going, I think this is B, and I don't think this is a variation of B. I think this is straight up B again, copy and paste. Okay? I don't know, these periods are driving me nuts. C again, and I think it's C again straight up. Now, I should point out the length thing. Let's assume that C is this, and this is half of that. In that case, I can still call it the same letter because really what I'm saying is C is this, and we have it twice here, and we have it once here. So if it's not different in terms of any of the musical elements, it's just I just happens twice. We could say, This is C twice, and this is C once. We could do that, or we could just simplify it and say that's C and that's C. It doesn't need a prime if it's just doubled in length. Okay. So that's our Normenclature that we're going to use here. So, A, B, C, anything can have an apostree after it, a prime. And we can even do more primes. Let's say we want to put a label on this outtro thing. I think this atro thing is related to this intro thing and this middle thing, but it's different again, right? So I would call that A prime prime. Okay, so we will call this a double prime, meaning it's like A, but it's different from A, and it's different from A prime. So it's a double prime. So if you get a track that repeats a lot of stuff over and over and over, but changes it every time, you can end up with prime prime prime prime prime, like that. But that's not likely. Okay, so any letter can get a prime, and letters can keep going up. It's just every time there's a new section, something totally new, it gets a new letter. Okay? And the letter it gets will be the next in the alphabet. Alright, so let's finally listen to this thing and do an analysis of it. 7. Analysis No. 1: Okay, I think I'm going to get in trouble in this class for playing tracks that are not mine. I've gotten in trouble for that with this class in this series previously. So we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. But for now, this is a track of mine. This is actually a remix of one of my tracks, a remix by someone else. But I'm sick of hearing the original, so we'll do the remix. Okay. So I'm going to hit play and I'm going to analyze this in real time. And you can really do that because the best way to figure out what to call each section is just by listening through it. And unless you're listening to something really crazy that changes all over the place, you can pretty much do it in one pass through the tune. Now, you're always going to start with A. The first thing in the track always gonna be A. So here we go. H 8. Analysis Detail: Okay, so let me explain what we found here. There are a couple oddities and a couple of things I wanted to double check, like this one. This one, the reason I put B question mark is just because I wanted to hear this section and this section and this section again, to determine if this is different enough. Okay? So let me just hear this again. Okay. I'll be prime. Alright. Okay, so it depends on how granular I want to be, but I am going to call this for now, B double prime, which I'll make this be triple prime. Think of that. Okay. So Okay. So other things, you'll notice that B without any prime happens here again. That's because this one sounded to me to be exactly the same as this one. So I'm going to call that B again. Similarly, this one B prime happened here again, and these sounded the same to me. So I called them both B prime. That means that these two are exactly the same, I think, or close to it. You know, sometimes it depends on how granular you want to get. And what that means is sometimes it can be all the same music, but there's, like, a high in it now, and it wasn't in it before. Could call that a new section. You could call that a modification, like a prime, or you could call it a same. It kind of just depends on how you want to do it. There's no real scientific way to do this. It's really what you hear as different or the same. This section, I heard is something totally different and only happening here. And it's because of that melody, that high melody. And we don't have the piano stuff. I think I think it's the only spot where we don't have that piano stuff. Another thing that I did is CODA. So a lot of the time when we have an outtro we don't if it's short, we don't really need to give it its own letter, even if it's related to other stuff. So this Otro is obviously related to A and A prime, but it's really short. It's really just kind of three chords. So we just call it CODA. CODA means the end. Literally, it means tail. But it's just kind of the end little piece, okay? So I'm just gonna call that CODA. Okay, so now what I could do is get a little what I like to do is take another look at the track but get less granular, as I said. In other words, this is looking really close at the track. What I want to do next is take one big step backwards and see if I can kind of get a larger picture of what the track is doing. Okay? So let's try to get a kind of I don't want to say 10,000 foot view of the track because that's too far, right? But let's take one step backwards and get a wider picture of what the track is doing next. 9. Taking a Step Back: Okay, so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna put this under, and I don't even need to look at the track now, although I might in a minute. So here's what we're gonna do. I want to say, Okay, so here's the kind of close up view. Let's step back. Let's say B and B prime. We could say, we're going to call this just B. Okay? Two Bs in a row that are modified, okay? Is now called B. So two Bs in a row that are modified. These are different. So let's call that B. Okay? So now what we have, that's only prime now. That's a prime. And I have two Bs next to each other, but they're not different. So now I have something a little easier to wrap our head around. I have A, B, C, B, A, B, B. Now, sometimes you can find more patterns in here. Like, for example, if B and C always happen next to each other, right? Then I could just call B a combination of B and C, right? That could be my new B is that big section. But that's not true here because here B is followed by C, here, B prime is followed by A, and here B is followed by B. So there's no other difference here. A is always followed by B. A prime is followed by B. So we could call A A B could be called A, but this is A prime. That's B. So I don't quite want to do that. C is by itself. So I think this gives me a little bit better picture of what's happening than this, whoops. This is what I would want to know if I'm trying to kind of copy the style of this piece. This is what I want to know if I'm just listening to the piece and I like the way kind of time unravels in the piece. So this is a bigger picture view. This is a smaller picture view. If I was going to go an even bigger picture view, which I could do, If I was going to go up one more level, what I might do is say, Okay, we have A. This whole section, we're going to call B. That we're going to call A. We just have a straight up repeat there, so I don't need to do that. Okay. So now I could say the whole piece can kind of be summarized as A, B, A, B, coda. Um, that would be like, A, B, A, B, CODA. That's kind of the first way we looked at it, right? So three different ways of looking at it. Focusing in more and more and more as we go down here, right? This is the view from the sky. This is the view from the trees, and this is the view on the ground, right? All three of these have uses. Okay, so the next thing I want to do is let's do another track. I think we need to do another analysis here in order to kind of really get this to sink in. So let's do another one. 10. Analysis No. 2: Okay, let's do one more. This is, again, another remix of a track of mine. The reason I'm using remixes is because I'm sick of listening to these tracks of my own, and these are a little different. So, okay, let's do it. So I'm going to do the same thing as before. I'm going to do kind of a form analysis based on what I hear one time through, and then we'll walk through and kind of do the different layers again. Here we go. To Stop the nods. Stop. Stop the Stop the. Stop the words. Stop the stop the Stop the nodes. Stop the notes. 11. Analysis Detail: Okay, let's take a look at what we found here. There were a couple oddities, primarily, whether or not a bee is worthy of being called new because there's a lot of bees, especially here, and calling them, you know, what's different from this bee to this be what's kind of tricky. So I might need to double check that. I do want to point out one thing here, though. If you heard this, You were maybe you thought, why not call this a new letter once this snare came in or the claps came in. So that gets us to a good thing to talk about. And that is what makes a section different than another section. Really, what we're looking for here is something that feels like a new section. It feels like new material. It feels new, right? So what we have here is we have this kick going, and then the clap comes in. That's not new section, right? That's building of a section. So that's the old section with more stuff on top of it. That didn't feel, to me, like a new section. Okay? So that's really the bar that we're looking for here is, does it feel like a new section? Um, okay, so back to this. So here I felt like, I'm just going to do that for a second. So this is definitely B. Here, I called this a direct copy of B. The dynamics are a little different, meaning, like, the sinth kind of ramps up a little bit. You can almost see that in the waveform. But the rest of the material is the same. Technically, we should probably call this B prime. And I guess if we're really zoomed in here, we will. That would make this double prime. Okay, this was interesting because I said this was a variation on this, which is really just that kick, maybe that kick and clap. Right? Yeah, and I think I stand by that. It really is just that with kind of a sustained synth in there. So I think that I'm comfortable calling that A prime. Okay, so now this B, I said, was different than these other two. Yeah. We really that really, like, Kylie Minogue key sound in there. Okay, let's go for this. Okay, here comes this. Okay, so is this the same as this? Yeah. Okay. Yep, so I'm good with that. Go call that straight up B. How do we get it again? Right here. Yeah, I'm good with that. Okay, this, I think, should be called the Triple Rhyme now. Yeah. So this is a tricky one because I can think of three different things to call this. I could call this B triple prime because it's B with everything stripped away except for the baseline and the drums. I could also call it A triple prime because it's the drums plus the baseline. So it's really similar to A, as well. Or I could say, screw it and call it just a Coda. Um, I don't love calling it a CODA because it doesn't feel like something additional tacked on. It feels like the song could actually keep going. So I'm not in love with calling it A CODA. I think I'm gonna stick with B triple prime. But I could go either way on. Okay. So that's kind of a clarification of what we found here. Now, do we see any patterns here? We do see some patterns, actually. So let's take our big step backwards, you know, climb up into the trees and look at it from the three different perspectives from the trees and from the clouds. 12. Taking a Step Back: Okay, so when we look at this, I see A, let me keep the waveform up here because I do want to see that for a minute. I see A as being a pretty significant chunk of the tune. Even though it's really simple music, it has a lot of time to it. So I'm going to leave A as is. So A is still A. Now, all of this B stuff, we could really call just B. If we're going to kind of be up a little bit higher into the trees, we could just say, the second section is B twice. So B and then a variation on B means B now. Okay? And then we have another version of A, which is really just a bridge. And then we have B in a variation. So we're going to call that B, and then we have B in a variation. So we're going to call that B. Right? So what we have now is A, B and a variation of B, a bridge, B, and a variation of B, B, and a variation of B. So A, B, A, B, B, okay? Interesting because now we're getting actually really close to the next thing I want to cover. Let's go way up. Here's what I'm gonna do if I go way up, and this is going to sound weird, but trust me on it, we're going to call this A, B, C, B. Okay? Now, where did that C come from? Here's where that C came from. So here's A, A, B, B. A prime, I'm going to actually call C now because it's a bridge, and I want it to look like a bridge. So it is related to this intro music, but it's really kind of serving to break up the Bs, right? So the Bs are being broken up by this A. So I want it to kind of look like that. So I'm going to call that a C. I'm going to say that's different. And then this last B, I'm going to say is two Bs because I'm on the view from the sky here, okay? So I could sum up the way this whole track works in any one of these ways. Okay? I could say, Well, it's A, B, then B prime, then A prime, then B double prime, then B, then B then B triple prime. That's a bit of a mouthful. I could say, it's A and then B and then A prime, and then B and then a second B. Or I could say, that's A, B, C, B. Cool. Now, these are going to be useful. Don't worry. Right now, you're thinking, that's a neat party trick, but how is that useful to me? It will be useful. So, what I want to do next is I want to talk about kind of standard forms, forms that are common to use, almost like form templates, okay? Forms that we see all the time. And then we're going to talk about how to apply some of this in your music. So let's go on to the next chunk and talk about kind of these standard forms. 13. Binary Form: Okay, in this section, I want to talk about a couple standard forms. Now, these are forms that people have been using for hundreds of years. Some of these are the most basic kind of forms. Some of them are a little more complicated. But what I really like about them is that there's a reason these have been around for hundreds of years. Like, they work. And it doesn't the genre doesn't matter. Like, yes, Mozart used this same form in his piece or, you know, in a symphony or something like that. But you can use it in a techno track, and it's going to work. Like, this is just how humans like to hear things. They like to hear things in certain patterns, right? We like to hear something, and then we like to hear something different. And then we like to hear that first thing again. That's just, like, the most fundamental principle of making something that people enjoy is give them something, give them something different, give them the first thing again, right? It creates a sense of familiarity, and that's what we like. So that actually is our first form. This is a standard form that has been around for millions of years, and this is called binary form. There are two variations of binary form. Let me actually write this a little bit differently. Binary form, colon. It could be a B, a a BA, or it can be ABAB. This, if we want to get technical, is called rounded binary form. This is just called binary form. So this is rounded binary. They're both types of binary form. Okay, so what do we have here? So we have some music, the same music again repeated, right? So this music repeated again, okay? Then we have something different, something totally different. But still related somewhat, right? It's the same piece of music, so it can't be just, like, totally out of left field. It's related somehow, but mostly it's a new kind of music. And then we have the first thing again, right? So the most common thing you'll ever find something, something again, something different, and you have first something. Now, the other way you can do it is something, something different, something, something different, right? That's what this is really saying. It's saying give me something, change it up, give me that first thing again, and then give me the second thing again. The reason that this works so well is that there is a certain gratification when we recognize things. That's what people want out of music, whether they know it or not. So when you play them something, the first time here, it's new, and they're like, Okay, this is interesting. But then as the piece goes on, they might think, I'm getting a little bored, so I need something different. So you give them something different. But then they think it would be nice to give them something that they recognize, and then they say, Oh, I recognize that, that brings gratification to them. So you give them the A section again. And then you need to change it up, so you give them the B section again. Again, they recognize it and it gives them enjoyment. So that's binary form. If you're working on a track and you're like, Okay, I have this A section, what do I do next? And you want to do something really simple and something that you know will work, you can do either of those two things. Do the A section again or come up with a B section, right? Very simple. Okay, let's go on to slightly different one called ternary form. 14. Ternary Form: Okay. Now let's talk about ternary form. Ternary. Now, you would think that if binary form is called binary because it has two different sections, ternary form would be called ternary because it has three sections. And you would be wrong, in a way, but you would also be right. Ternary form is A, B A. Okay? So this is has always confused me. Whenever I when I was learning this and I had to take this on exams and stuff, I'd be like, Why is that not binary or some other form of binary. It just gets its own word. It's weird. So we would call this ternary form. The theory is because it's three different chunks. One, two, three, right? Um, whereas the others are both four different chunks, right? So they have two different kinds of music in binary form and in ternary form, but ternary form has three chunks, and binary form has two or four chunks, depending on how you look at it. So, in ternary form, again, one of the most simplest and probably the most simple type of form. You have some music, something different, and then the same thing again, the first thing again. As simple as it sounds, depending on how you're looking at a piece of music, I think that probably a lot, like, a very high amount of the music I write falls into ternary form. If you're looking at that, you know, from the sky level, this is how I think about music when I'm writing. What I think about is I'm going to do some stuff. I'm going to make a lot of music here, and now I'm going to pull you away from that, and I'm going to do a lot of something else. And then I'm going to go back to the first stuff. That's what I do in pretty much every tune I write. I might have other tricks within each section, but really the way I'm thinking in the big scheme of the Ps, you know, from the sky view is something, something different, the first thing again. That's really how I think about all of my music. So now, sometimes I combine the B and the A, and I'll talk more about that in just a second. So in a minute, I'll say, Here's a trick I do in just about every tune I write. And it's a variation on this. But you'd be surprised at how common this is if you're looking at it from that 10,000 foot view. 15. Rondo: Okay, next slide I want to talk about Rondo. A Rondo is a form that is not super common in electronic music, but I kind of think it should be. And I think if we analyzed a whole bunch of electronic music, I think you would find this, actually. If you analyze the DJ set, I think you would find something similar to a Rondo happening. But, I mean, over the course of, like, a four hour Dj set. So, here's what Rondo is. It's fun because it's a form that can go on forever. It is a B, A, C, A, D, a, E, F, et cetera. So the pattern here is A. This is called the Rondo and it comes back. So the Rondo something different. The Rondo something different. The rondo, something different, the Rondo, something different, the Rondo, something different. And literally this can go on all day. Um you can think of it as, like, a chorus as the Rondo. And then imagine a verse, but every verse was different. Or if you're thinking of, like, something more kind of dance music related, you can think of like a chorus, but then a different track. And then the same the chorus and different track, chorus, different track, chorus, different track. What's key here is that these sections don't need to be related at all, right? They're just totally different stuff. But they always go back to the Rondo thing, the A. Okay, that's a Rondo form. I find it fun for when I'm working on a piece of music and I'm just kind of stuck. It's fun to think, Okay, well, I've done an A, a B, A, but there's more here. Like, what else can I add to this piece? The think, Well, I'll do a C. And then we'll go back to the A, and then I'll do a D, and then I go to an A, and then E. Because basically you can write half as much music and be done with it, right? Because once you write the A section, you've got half the piece written, no matter how long it goes. It's kind of a good trick. For when you need to write a lot of music really fast. I'm not gonna lie. I've used that on some projects that had a tight deadline. But it works. Okay? So Rondo is a good trick. It's a good way to kind of think about music when you're working on a tune and see how it comes together. Let's talk about a few more. 16. Theme and Variation: Okay, the next one that I want to look at is theme and variation. This is, again, not something that's really common to do in electronic music, but is a good way to think about music and a way to generate some ideas fairly quickly. So if you're stuck on a track, if you've got something where you're like, I've made a minute of music, and it's really cool and I'm really happy with it, and I just have no idea where to go. Try this. This might be something that works out well. Theme and variation is really simple. A, A prime. A prime prime. A prime prime prime. A prime prime prime prime. A prime prime prime prime prime. A prime prime prime prime prime prime. Et cetera. You see the pattern here. So it's just it is what it is. It's a theme and then a variation on it, another variation on it, another variation on it, another variation, another variation, and another variation. We just keep modifying A. Now, what I think is actually interesting, and I've talked about things like this in my composition class, but theme and variation actually is a really good thought experiment because here's something that I like to do. When I'm working on a piece and I'm super stuck, take a section and treat it like a theme and variation, but then you're going to throw out a bunch of the variations. So here's what I do. I say, Okay, I've got this section written. It's pretty cool. I'm happy with this music. What else can I do with it? I'll be like, Okay, here's a variation. And then here's another variation. Here's another variation. Here's another variation. Here's another variation. Here's another variation. So then what I'll do is I'll say, Okay, I've made six variations of this. I'm going to throw out these five. And then this one is probably goofy enough to call it a B, right? So just make a ton of variations, and then by the time you make the sixth one, you're probably thinking so far out of the box that you've made something interesting. Anyway, that is totally different than using this as a standard form. That's just a trick I like to do. So theme and variation is just a section and then an infinite number of variations on a section. 17. Other Forms (My Secret Weapon...): There are a bunch more of these, and you can look up a bunch more. There's probably 50 or 60 of these that are fairly well known and standardized, but I won't bore you with all of them. I just kind of wanted to point out a few that I thought were exceptionally useful. There's one more that I use a lot, and I hear other people using a lot in electronic music. It doesn't really have a standard name. It's not a standardized form. It's just something that is, I think, kind of popular and something that I've really latched onto and used a tone in my music. This is kind of what I was talking about before when I was talking about terniary form. So that form is, I just call it A plus B doesn't have a great name, but that's what I call it. So the form is an A section, a B section, and then A and B at the same time. Or you can do it that way. Okay? So this is just kind of just one of my favorite things to do. I make some music, and then I make some other music. And then I make both of these in a way that they fit together like two pieces of a puzzle and make essentially a third thing. So this is a C section that is a combination of the A section and the B section. So you would think, Oh, that sounds really hard because I have to write this in a way that it's going to fit with this, and I have to write this in a way that's gonna fit with this. It's actually not that hard. Here's the secret. Write this first. Um if you write this, then you just kind of peel half of it away, put it there, peel the other half away, put it there, and then voila. You have a really smart sounding track. Here's an example. This is a track of mine. It's all centered around this little piano if. Right here. Okay, so here's the main groove with the piano if. Okay. So then, so that's the big A section. Then we have the B section that really focuses on this more percussive synth sound. Okay? So then for a C section, I do them at the same time, where I turn the percussive synth sound into the piano if. It's a technique that I really like because it gives that sense of recognition that we talked about earlier. So I give someone an A section, and then when it happens here, they're like, Oh, yeah, I recognize that, but it's more complicated now. And it's I feel like it's a little more rewarding when you recognize it. It's also double because they recognize both this and that. And maybe they sit back and say, That was a pretty clever move, Mr. Producer. And I say, Thank you. So it's a good trick. I really like. So give it a try. 18. How To Use These In Your Tracks: Okay, we've talked a little bit along the way here in these last handful of videos about how to apply some of these formal ideas into your own music. But I want to give you one more way that you can do that. And that is start with a plan. Let it go off the rails, though. Okay? So here's what I mean. What I mean is when you start working on a track, say, Okay, I'm going to make a track that's going to be A, A, B, A, C, A, whatever you want it to be, whatever you fancy. And then say, Okay, that's my goal. That's what I'm going to do. You can even put markers in your session to kind of remind you where you should be. So you start with a plant, right? Then you get to the B section and you say, wait a minute here. This B section is, like, super ad. I'm really, really into this B section. So what I really want to do is, I don't know, I'll go to something different here, but then I want to go back to this B section again and maybe do it twice. So let your plan change, right? Like, let it go off the rails, let it meander. But starting with a plan in terms of the form can really help you avoid any kind of writer's block altogether. Just say, This is what my plan is. Let it change. Don't let it, you know, don't be bound to it. But if it doesn't need to change, don't change it. I do this for every track I work on. I always have a plan. I never stick to the plan, but I always start with one, just so that, you know, I get to the spot where I go, Oh, what comes next? I can say, Well, I need a variation on A. That's what comes next. Okay, cool. Let's get to work. Really simplifies that process. So I encourage you to use these forms as that as your starting plan and a way to build up the track altogether. Now, let's get into the weeds a little bit more on what makes the difference between sections, right? We haven't really talked about that yet. What I mean by that is the A section and the B section sound different. Yes, we can agree on that. However, why? What makes them sound different? What makes the sections different? We've kind of talked about why we use different sections. We've talked about why we repeat sections, but we haven't talked about what makes them different and how in your tracks you can make sections sound different, right? Techniques you can use to make this sound different than that. Coming up next. 19. What Makes Sections Sound Different?: Okay, so the next thing I want to look at is when we're going between two sections, what is it actually that makes one section sound different than the next section? So what I'm thinking here is, I'm imagining you're working on a track and you've got something cool going, and you just don't know what to do next. And as luck would have it, I happen to have a track that I was working on recently, and I don't really know what to do next. So I'm going to walk through and take my own advice here and try a couple of different things. The way I think about it, there are basically five different things you can do. And when I say five different things, what I really mean is there are five different things you can use to make one section sound different than another section. But there's 1 million different ways that you could apply each of those five things, right? It's not like there are only five directions you can go. These are just five ways of thinking about coming up with a new section that will kind of get you heading in the right track, okay? So I want to go through each of these five and talk about kind of how I think about each one of them and how I apply them. And hopefully by the end of this, I'll have worked myself out of the corner I'm in with this weird track. Okay, so the five things are volume, harmony, density, instrumentation, and the most ethereal one, absence of something. So let's dive in and let's work on the volume one first. 20. Volume: So I have this track I'm working on, and I'm almost embarrassed to show this track because it's just so much of a mess right now. This is really just a sketch. Don't judge me on it. I like some of the ideas in it. I haven't really refined any of them. I haven't played around with it. The mix is terrible. But I'm just kind of in the composition phase. So I'm going to show this to you anyway. My idea here was to apply a bunch of effects and processing to this Bach orchestral suite and see if I can do anything fun with it. Eventually, I ended up with this little loop. So, that kind of plays a role. And then I added this really weird harmony to it. Anyway, let's just hear it up to where I'm stuck, which is right here. I'm gonna put a little marker and say, What? We don't know what to do next. Now, I've added something already that demonstrates what I want to talk about in this video. But let's just get up to that point for now. Okay? Here we go. On solo. That B, B, B, B, B Okay. So what comes next? Um, so, getting back to this kind of five ideas of what we could do. The first one that I want to think about is volume. So I can make a big change in volume, right? I could get a lot louder, I could get a lot quieter. Those are my options here, right? Volume if assume volumes here, we can go up or we can go down. Now, when you're trying to make a big change, usually the easiest thing is to go down. Unless you're working on a really quiet track, and then you suddenly want to get loud to make a new section, that generally doesn't work very well, actually. If that's your case, where you're working on a really quiet track and you need a new section, this idea of using volume to differentiate your sections is probably not the best way to go. You're working on something like this that's pretty much the same volume all the way through so far, then, if we looked at the waveform for this, it would be like, just like a block, aside from the intro. But even that is, like, pretty consistent volume, you know, all the way across. So a good option might be to get quieter, and that's a way we can make next section feel like something different, right? So that's what I actually have set up here already. And what I did is a little bit more elegant than just dropping down and getting quieter in this next section. What happens is we still have a good bit of volume. I used like 8 bars or so this much time. To kind of slowly get quieter, right? And so this is kind of a transition down to a quieter sound, and it makes room for this piano to come in and be kind of the focus. So everything kind of so if you imagine the waveform is going to look like, it's going to be a pretty consistent block all the way up to this point, and then it's going to kind of taper down. And that'll make it sound like a new section. So let's just hear it maybe right from where the violins enter and then we'll keep going into this quieter section there about it. Okay, so that works. Okay. I think that's a respectable idea. But in the interest of not being totally satisfied, let's try another one of these techniques. Okay? So next, let's look at idea number two, and that is harmony. And 21. Harmony: Okay. Next, let's look at harmony. So with harmony, what we mean is just changing the harmony, right? Changing up the harmony can really give something the feel of a whole new section, even if it's a very subtle change. You'd be surprised at how little you can mix up the harmony and have it feel like a whole new section. So what I've done here is here's our rather strange harmony that's happening, and now I added a new harmony here. I let the strings just hang over on the note that they were on just a little bit longer. I changed the bassline to fit the new harmony, and then I just kept the drums going. So the only thing that changes here or I added this little snare hit in really what you're going to hear is the harmony change here. Volume isn't going to change. It will thin out a little bit in this section because the strings stop. But the main thing that's going to make it feel like a new section right here is this change in harmony. Okay? Now, the trick I did here to really make it feel like a change is that this harmony throughout the whole track is pretty dissonant, right? It's not really in any key. If we look at these chords, they're really bizarre. They're just triads. So we have a G, C, E, so we have a C major triad. Then we have an E A C sharp. Then we have an A major triad. Those are not in the same key. Then we have a G major triad. Yeah, which doesn't make a ton of sense. And then we have a B flat major triad. So it's really just moving around in planes. This is kind of the Dabusi technique. So it's really kind of not firmly in any real key. But what I'm going to do here is make the harmony fairly diatonic, meaning kind of stick into a key. So I kind of move over to a flat major just because I don't know, that seemed like a good idea. So we're just gonna go B flat major, A flat major, B flat major, A flat major is really all that's gonna happen. So I guess we could call that either key, depending on if we're calling it major or minor. Doesn't matter. So let's hear it. And you tell me if right when we get there, does it feel like we went to a new section? Okay. That's cool. I like it. You know, another thing I did here that helps it feel different, not necessarily right at the downbeat here, but the whole kind of 8 bars is that this is a This is a four bar or a four chord chord progression, right? It's a loop with four chords. And then we switch to a loop with two chords, right? So this is just alternating two chords back and forth. That's something that I found really works well to make a new section by just using the harmony. Switch up the number of harmonies in it. Go from a four chord progression to a two chord progression. Org or from a four chord progression to a six or an eight chord progression. Something that kind of changes that big pulse of the way the cords are moving can really help it feel like a new section. Okay, so this is cool. This is an option. Here's my previous option. I just drug it out there, and I'm going to do the same with this one. So I'm going to say, that's okay. But I don't love love it. So, you know, in the end, I should just do all of these back to back and see what happens. It'll be funny. Okay, well, let's come up with something else. 22. Density (Texture): Okay, the next thing, the next kind of parameter that I would look at is density. And another way to think about this is texture. So with density, what I mean is how much that's happening. Imagine that waveform, right? That waveform is nice and thick. Can I thin it out without affecting the volume? And usually, this will also affect the volume. But what I'm going to do here is, I'm just going to keep the same music going, but I'm going to swap out the beat for just this snare hit. And then what I did is, if you look at the automation, I ramped up the volume a little bit of that snare hit right at the end, and I also automated this filter to open up because this loop is a whole drum loop that presently I have filtered out, so we just get this crunchy snare and a little bit of other stuff, but it's mostly just a snare hit. But then right at the end, it'll open up, so we hear the full drumbeat, and then it leads us back into the drumbeat we had. So basically, we're going to have no drumbeat here and just this snare hit going through here. And so the texture is going to thin because we're going to lose the drumbeat. We' still going to have a drumbeat, but we're going to have a much thinner drumbeat, right? So let's take a listen to that. Ooh. So loaded still. Back to fire. All right. And then we're back into where we were. So it's a short section, but it definitely changes the texture, right? I definitely feels like something different because we've really kind of pulled a layer out. Now, this is a section that if we were calling all of this A, we might call this A prime because it's really the same music just with a different drumbeat. But that's okay. It's still a different section. So, again, it's an idea. Texture things can be really fun to play with, and I like it. It's cool. But it's not perfect. So let's try something else. 23. Instrumentation: Okay, the next element that I want to look at is instrumentation. That would mean adding a new instrument, which in our electronic music world, really means adding a new sound, okay? So a new instrument could be an actual instrument, like we could pop in a saxophone that would make it sound like a new section. Or I could add a new synth, something we haven't heard before, something to that'll make someone listening to it say, Oh, that's new, right? That's what we want. So, I tried that here. So what I did is I took our main synth part here, and I added in three new instruments, actually, to make kind of one unified sound. So the first layer I've added is just an organ. To the next chord. Alright, so a simple organ, this kind of backwards piano sample. And then this kind of choppy keyboard. Okay. Everything else stays the same. So you're going to hear that all of this stuff doesn't really make a texture change, right? We're switching, but the density is still more or less the same. It's still like, if we look at the waveform of this rendered out as a stereotrack, we probably won't be able to see this change, right? Because this is going to be sufficiently loud, at least as loud as this one was, and it's not going to look like a change in density of the music, but it'll certainly sound like one. So let's see if we like. Oops. Something so low still. There we go. Okay. Not bad. It's another candidate. But we still have one more thing to explore. So let's take all of this. I'm running out of space here. And let's push it over here to there. Um, I don't want that. Okay, one more thing to explore and then we'll see what happens. We'll see what our favorite is. 24. Absence of Something: Okay, the next is probably the easiest. Well, it's definitely the easiest. And that's just to take something away. You could do a lot of different ways. So what I've done is I basically just extended the loop again. I let the violin stop. Now, technically, we're already taking something away here, right, because the violin stops, but the violin only recently entered. So I don't think that's going to be enough to really feel like a new section. So I want to take something else away to make this feel like a new section. The most obvious thing would be the drums, right? If we take the drums away, we don't put any other drums there. We just leave it empty. It's definitely gonna feel like a new set. Right? And that's cool. That's definitely a very, um, good way to go. Take the drums away, let it rock out for a little bit, then drop the drums back in. That almost always works. But let's try something a little more adventurous. Let's take the harmony away and the bassline. That leaves us with almost nothing but. I still got baselines happening. Let's actually, I really want to feel if this is rewarding in any way. So I'm going to take all of this and I'm going to bring it back here. So a lot of the times, this is the best way to test something. So we're going to take all this away, and then I want to see if it feels like even yet another section when it comes back, right? This should feel rewarding when it comes back. So let's try it from here. Oops, but I don't want the strings to come back. Okay. Not bad. It's just a little too empty here, right, for this to work. But there are situations where something like this would work perfectly well, right? But I don't think this is one of them. But it's an interesting option, right? Okay, let's go to a new video and kind of talk about what we found in all of this. 25. Applying these Techniques in your Music: Okay, so having gone through all those options, what's my favorite? Um, my favorite is really none of them. None of those options were particularly satisfying enough for me. So I need to keep working on it in order to really nail it. But let's try this. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to rip through all of them. So here's where we left off. So the first thing we're going to do is get the absence, right? So we're going to have just drums. But then when we come back, we're going to have this section with a new instrumentation. Then after that, we're going to go into this section with a different drum loop. So this would be a different density. Then after that, it looks like we're gonna have two of that. No, then we go back to the original. And then this one doesn't quite line up right. Then we go into the new harmony. That's going to sound weird. Okay, so now we have the new harmony idea. And then we're going to go into the first one we did, which is change of volume. Okay, so wouldn't it be cool if all of these just worked, and then I just finished the track? That would be awesome. Who knows? Maybe this will sound just amazing. And I'll release this track. I kind of doubt it, but let's find out. Here we go. 26. Making New Sections in a Track: Okay, so what did we think? It was more interesting than I was expecting, and it actually gave me a really good idea. You know, some of it worked and some of it didn't work just in a row like this, but it made me think I should be treating this track as a theme in variation because in that way, that's basically what we've set up here, right? It's a whole bunch of variations on this core progression or this baseline, really. And that idea, I think, works really well. It needs to be fine tuned quite a bit, but that's what I should do. Now I want to point out one more thing. When you're doing this, in most cases, what you probably want to do is think about more than one of these elements at a time. So it's not just that changing the harmony might help, but also if you really want to hit it out of the park, change the harmony and do a density change or change the volume and do an instrumentation change, right? So doing multiple of these elements is really how you make it feel like a really strongly rooted new section. So and that can help you when you're writing a track. You get to the end of a section, you think, Okay, what do I do next? Think about these five elements, volume, harmony, density, instrumentation, and absence, and then think pick two. Pick two, and that's what I got to do. Pick three. Make a challenge for yourself. And that'll make it so you've got some ways to think about music that you're making that might be able to get you out of the box that you're stuck in if that's what's going on. Okay. Enough about that. Let's talk about melodies. 27. The Science of Melody: Okay, so so far in this class, we've been talking about form and structure as it applies to the whole track. Now I want to zoom in a little bit and talk about form and structure as it applies to a melody. Now, I know a lot of the music that people write in electronic music doesn't really have a melody, and that's totally okay. You can apply this info to other aspects of music. But a lot of you, I know, are concerned about melody and have questions about melody. We did look at harmonizing melody, kind of what makes a good melody in earlier sections of this course. But what we're gonna do now is look at melody from a kind of classical approach. Now, don't freak out. That doesn't mean, you know, we're gonna play it on violin and look at the notes and all that good stuff. I want to do is look at how some of the best melodies are structured, because there is kind of a science to it when it comes to, you know, phrasing and motives, and there's these things called sentences and periods, and there's this whole science to it. And I want us to kind of delve into that. We won't get really deep into it because it is kind of a rabbit hole of how deep you can go with this granular picking a part of a melody. But I do want to introduce the idea so that you can explore it more if you like. And if nothing else, it will help you when you're working on coming up with melodies. Okay? So let's start with talking about phrasing by and let's kind of put a definition on this term phrase. 28. Defining a Phrase: Okay, so this first thing we're dealing with is called a phrase. Now, a phrase is different than a melody, okay? Phrase is usually considered to be a part of a melody, but a melody might be made up of several phrases. The definition of a phrase is really just any kind of small bit of material that has a cadence. Okay? So we know what cadences are, right? That means there's some kind of nicely wrapped up bow on the end of it. So we're looking for in a melody, a spot where it kind of goes down and lands on tonic or maybe it lands on five, but the harmony goes to tonic, so it feels like a cadence, something like that. Anything that's a small bit of info that cadence. Now, that small bit of info, you know, small bit of melody or something like that, that's very relative term, right? That could be a bar. It could be a half a bar. It could be 2 bars, could be 4 bars, could be 128 bars, depending on how your track is structured. It's probably not 128 bars. That would be pretty weird. But usually, we have several phrases in a melody. We'll do some analysis of a melody in just a second. Now, the idea behind a phrase is that we're kind of going back to that same idea that we talked about earlier in this class with structure and form, and that is giving the listener something to recognize. So with the phrase, what we want to do is we're trying to make kind of small units of stuff that we can use multiple times, okay? So we might have the phrase happen. Then later in the melody, that same phrase happens again. Maybe it's slightly different or something, but when it does happen again, we get to have that kind of cognitive moment of This is familiar. Like, I recognize this because that's what makes things generally pleasurable to listen to when it comes to melody and structure and form. So we kind of build in that piece of recognition within the melody itself, right? Um so with phrasing, we're going to make a little nugget, and then later in the same melody, we're going to use that nugget again. It's reusable reusable nuggets. I should just adopt that as my new definition of phrase. Reusable nuggets with the cadence, I guess. Now, sometimes when we talk about phrases, we talk about them in terms of goals, which is a weird thing, and I don't particularly like it, but it's worth mentioning. A lot of the time, when people are analyzing a phrase, what they're doing is they're looking for the goal of the phrase, and that usually means something like a cadence, okay? So it means that a phrase is going so imagine a melody. It's going, and then where is it trying to get to? Because where it's trying to get tells us the story of the melody, because it either gets there, nice and easy and it's a happy little story. I got to where it was trying to go. It achieved its goal, or it didn't. It didn't get there, and something went haywire, and that kind of becomes a narrative within the melody. So there's kind of things like that you can do. I don't really like thinking of phrasing in terms of goals because it just feels I don't know, it feels a little too, like, utilitarian or something for me. I think phrases can just be but if you want to think of them that way, you can. Now, one more thing about phrasing is that because we have this kind of cadence idea built in, we do have to look at harmony. It's really difficult to look at a melody without considering the harmony, right? Because we really want to know where those cadences are because those kind of become the pillars that are holding up our melody. So with that, I have for us a famous classic and wonderful melody for us to examine. I'm probably going to get in trouble for using it, but I'm going to do it anyway. So let's go on and do an analysis of that. 29. Phrasing in Hey "John": Okay, I have plugged in here a melody and a harmony. So you've probably heard this melody before, in order to maybe try to dodge the copyright police. I'm going to call this hey John. And I'm gonna say it's by a group called the Crickets. Okay. Here's what it sounds like. Okay. So why am I using this melody? This isn't very electronic music. It doesn't really matter. It's a melody. It's a very nice melody. There's a reason this is considered a timeless melody. It's structured very well. It's got familiar motives in it. It's got a simple yet interesting harmony. It's got kind of everything we need. So what we're going to do is we're going to try to pick this apart and look for phrases in this melody, okay? And I'll try to give you this file at the end of this section, in case you want to just play around with this little melody. It's always tricky to program in a melody in the Migrid. This is one of those cases where Um, I would just so much rather use traditional notation, because it's really easier for this kind of thing if you learn notation, if you have a firm understanding of it, you know, you've got these weird little 16th notes that are hard to click in just right and make it feel natural. Anyway, um, okay, let's analyze this sucker. 30. Finding Phrases: Okay, so let's find our phrases in this melody. Okay? So the first thing I'm gonna do is actually look at the heart Well, no, let's look at the melody first. So the first question is, is this a phrase? Let's hear it. One more time. This last note bugs me. That should be one note, I think. Okay, is that a phrase? Is it a chunk of musical material that has a cadence? Well, let's look at the harmony to figure out if it has a cadence. So, let me zoom in a little bit here. Lovely. So what is our last chord, FAC? I'm just going to tell you we're in the key of F here. So FAC, our chord before that CEGC. So that is a five chord in F, and that is a one chord. That's a nice strong cadence. So yes, it has a cadence. Yes, it is a chunk of stuff. Therefore, yes, it is a motive. However, I'm going to show you that there are actually two and maybe three motives within this melody, okay? The first one is this. That much. Let's see. Let's do this. Bloop. Uh can I That's not gonna work, is it? No. Trying to just think of a way to change the color. Let's do this. Okay. Yeah, that didn't help much. Um, so there's our first melody. So, if we look at the cadence that's happening right there, that would be right here. So let's just hear the let's look at the chords while we're kind of analyzing this. Okay. So is this a cadence? What do we have here first? Here we have FAC, there's our tonic chord. And here we have F, G A. That's actually a sharp. There we go. FGA sharp. This is one of those things. That should be called a B flat. And if it was, we would have C, a missing E, G, B flat. That would be a 57 chord. So that is very strong cadence, 51 with the seventh. So that is our first phrase is this chunk of stuff. Now, the second phrase is could be two things. It could be the second half. Let's just hear that. Right? We know that there's a cadence at the end. We've already heard that. So this is the second phrase. There might be a third phrase, though. You could argue that there is a phrase right here. That by itself could be a phrase. Why? It's its own little nuget of stuff, and it has a cadence. Let's look at that. Okay. So it's these two cords. Okay? So let's look in at those. So here we have FAC, okay? So we have tonic. Here we have F, let's call that B flat, D. That makes B flat D F being our triad. That's a four cord, which now we know about cadences, that is a plagal cadence. So you could argue that this is a phrase by itself. This is a nugget of information that we might be able to use later in the piece by itself, right? We can play with this. And they kind of do. But it's really short. It might be a little too small for me to call it a phrase. If I was analyzing this and this was a proper music theory exam or something like that, I probably would basically say the first half is a phrase and the second half is another phrase. This if a student said, this is a phrase, I'd probably mark it correct. But the next question would be, can this be a phrase on its own? Yeah, I think it can actually, because it's just kind of walking up in arpeggio or a scale and then back down. So that could work. So anyway, it's a matter of opinion. This is where that, like, size of a phrase gets into gets debatable, right? As a phrase long or short. In this case, I think that's a little too short to really be considered a phrase for my taste, but you can call it a phrase all you want. Okay, so that's what a phrase is Nuggetive stuff with a cadence, okay? I'm gonna velocity back up here so we can see it or we can hear it. Um, Okay, so, before I forget, I'll give you this little session to play with, if you want. And then we're going to go into another term, and that is motives. 31. Definition of a Motive: Okay, so phrases are cool. It will help you when you're putting together melodies to think about the melodies in terms of phrases. Try to create phrases in your melodies because, again, that's just something that we like to hear. You don't have to have them. It's not, you know, it's not a bad melody if you can't figure out what the phrases are, but it certainly helps to think about phrases while you're writing a melody. Now, there's another thing we can use also that works a little bit different. And this is called a motive. Motive is a much more kind of a fluffy term. It's not as strictly defined as phrases are. Motives tend to be shorter, and the rule actually for motives is the same as phrases with two differences. One is that it does not need a cadence to call it a motive, okay? So if you have a little chunk of stuff, if it doesn't have a cadence, but it still kind of lives as its own little chunk, you can call it a motive. Another hallmark of a motive, and this is an important one is that they repeat. Okay? So if we're going to call something a motive, we have to hear it at least twice. Now, it does not need to be back to back. You know, we don't need to hear the same thing twice. It can be we hear it. We hear some other stuff, maybe even some other stuff after that, and then we hear it again, right? There can be stuff in between. Um, and it does not need to repeat the same. It just needs to be similar enough to where we kind of recognize it as something we've heard before. Okay? So you could have a motive in, like, a major key, and then something some other music happens after that. And then you get the motive again, but now it's in a minor key, right? So there's some notes changed that still works. And in fact, that's actually a great way to kind of tell a story. It shows, you know, we're in a major key. For simplicity's sake, we'll just say, we're happy. Our melody goes through something, this middle thing, and then it comes out the other side, and now it's in minor. Now it's sad. So that starts to craft a little story about what our motive is or what our melody is and what it's going through. By the way, we transform that motive. Okay? So I want us to look at a couple of motives, and then we're going to look at kind of things you can do to a motive to make that second time that it comes a little different and to tell the story. And this will help you when you're thinking about writing a melody, right? A lot of the times when you're writing a melody, it's just like, I don't know, there's a note, and there's another note. What comes next? What's the best thing to do? So thinking in terms of phrases and motives and these kinds of ideas can really help you solidify your thinking, right? Give you a roadmap to what you're thinking. Just think, Okay, I have this motive. I'm going to do a phrase after that, and then I'm going to do that motive again, but it's going to be twice as long this time or something like that. Okay, so let's dig in a little bit deeper into looking at a motive. And then we'll talk about how to kind of mutate a motive. 32. Finding Motives: Okay, I have another melody here by that same group as before, we'll call them the Insexs. This is a song that might be familiar to you. It's called we're gonna give it a fake name. It's called Eleanor Frisbee. And, um here's what it sounds like. But Okay. So do we have motives here? Well, actually, first, let's see if we have any phrases here. We don't have really strong cadences anywhere. We're alternating between two chords. Let's see, CEG, C major and E minor. C major, here, E minor, here. We're just alternating between C major and E minor. So if we think our key is C major, Then we're going 1-3. That's not a great cadence. We could also think of our key as an E minor, in which case, we're going 1-6. Which is also not a very good cadence. So no real strong cadences here. So the idea of these being a phrase doesn't really work, or this being a phrase doesn't really work. But we have two different motives here. Okay? So the first motive, I'm going to call this the first motive. Okay, that. There's no strong cadence, but we do get it again, right here. We get it again exactly the same. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. But in this case, it is. It can be exactly the same. Now, there's another motive kind of in here. That little thing. Those are also both exactly the same. So two different motives gets us four things of music. So one way that this is handy is that you might think of this as a chunk of stuff, right? Main the first motive and the second motive. But it's actually in most cases, more musically interesting to think of this as its own thing that happens twice, and this as its own thing that happens twice. Because what you get then is more things to play with, right? If you have this, as a single, let's call it a phrase, even though it doesn't have a cadence. Or let's call it a motive. Let's say, if this is our motive, then when we repeat this, we can play around with it, but we have the two things together. But if I have this as my phrase or my motive, I've got a smaller amount of stuff to play with, but I can make more out of it. Think of it like this. You've got legos, right? If you have nothing but big legos, you're limited to what you can build with big legos. You need small pieces in order to really craft something great. So, the smaller our legos, the more work it is, but the more detailed we can get with what we can build from it, right? So we're thinking about these motives in the same way. We've got little Legos. We can build a lot of stuff with these little legos, we're going to walk through how to do that in the next section. To motives in this melody both happen twice, and that note is in the second motive also. Keep leaving that one out. One other thing I'll point out, you might think melodies are single notes and this one is two notes at the same time. Just to point out, in case you're wondering, melodies don't need to be just one note. Melodies can be single notes. Melodies can be whole chords, if you want. The term melody doesn't really have a strict definition, but it can be multiple notes. Really, what we're looking for is a melody is something you can sing, right? You can't sing two notes at once, which is why we tend not to think of these two notes or as a harmony being a melody, right? Because you can't sing two notes at once. But this still gets stuck in your head, and you can still sing this. You're most likely going to sing the top note. That tends to be what we do when whoops, or I do. Oh, yeah. When we have a chord that we try to sing is we generally sing the top. But you find melodies that are harmonized like this all the time. So it doesn't mean it's not a melody if it's got more than one note. Okay. Let me give you this file, and then let's play around with seeing what we can do with motives. 33. Motive Alterations: Alright, so in these next, I don't know, five or six videos, we're gonna walk through how to alter a melody. And for that, I want us to go to a really simple melody because we're going to do some kind of weird stuff to it. So I am going to go with a melody that we probably are all familiar with. I think we're all familiar with this melody. I mean, I would wonder if this is something that happens in all countries. But let me just plug this in. If you can name it while I'm doing this, just try to hear this in your head. Oops. I'm putting in quarter notes. There we go. Can you name it? It's probably something that you know. Here it is. Does it go up right there? What if it goes up to a G there. Sometimes people sing it going up to a G there and sometimes they don't. Let's leave it going up to a G because that'll make it more interesting. And let's not add any harmony here. Let's just work with the melody as it is. Okay, remember that when you're doing these alterations to a melody, your goal is to make it sound different, but still be familiar. Some of these things we're going to do to it, like playing it upside down and stuff like that, can result in it being so bizarre that it's totally unfamiliar that is an interesting way to generate new material, but generally loses the motive, right? People won't hear it as connected to the motive that we had before, and that will make it less successful. So, you want to trigger that familiarity, but show a change. So show something different. That's the goal we're trying to achieve here. So here's a whole bunch of ways to do that. 34. Motive Mode Change: Okay, the first thing we can do is change the mode. Okay? So we've looked at modes. You know what modes are by now. So this is in the key of C major, the way I've written it. There's a C. Let me zoom in a little bit here. Okay. So C. So it's in C major. Let's put it in the minor key, right? So I'm going to take all my E's and move them down to E flat. Nothing else would be affected. In the key of C minor. We still have D, and we still have G, and we still have C, obviously. So now we have Mary had a little lamb, but in minor, right, which is inherently darker and creepier, especially when you take a nursery rhyme like this, put it in a minor key. You have summoned demons basically. Let's hear. Right? It's just sad and creepy, to put a children's song in a minor key. Um, what else can we do? If we take this back to major, I could put it in a different mode altogether. Like, I could put it in Lydian. Although what would happen if I put it in Dldian nothing. Lydian would be no different because what's different in Lydian is it has erased four, right? It's a major scale with raised four. That would be F. And I don't have any Fs in here. So this might be in Lydian. We don't know because we don't have any Fs. Um What's one that I could actually change it to Phrygian would be a flat two and minor? Sure. That's just a little disheartening. But it's a simple thing you can do to change a melody around. Switch up the mode. 35. Motive Inversion: Okay, this next one is probably the hardest one to figure out. It's something that whenever I've had to do this on paper in notation, I have to really think hard about it. So I'm going to try to do it now. I'm likely to screw it up, though. This is called inversion. And inversion is a term that we've used in music for a long time. We have inverted melodies. We have inverted chords. You know what inverted chords are. This is a little different. We invert a melody, what we're going to do. So we're going to take a note, and we're basically going to play it upside down. But there's a very specific way we're going to do this. So our next note, I'm going to do this. I'm going to duplicate this so that I can come back to it. Okay. So our first note is here. We don't do anything under the first note. We leave that where it is. The second note goes down a whole step, right? So instead of going down a whole step, we're going to go up a whole step. We're just going to switch the direction but keep the interval. So the next note went down a whole step from the original before I moved it. So we're going to go up another whole step. Okay? This one went up a whole step, so it's going to go down a whole step. You can already see how this is an inversion of the other one. It's opposite, right? It's upside down. Okay, so from here to here, originally, before I moved that note, it went up a whole step. So now it's going to go down a whole step. So that note is still right. These three notes are going down a whole step, so they're going to go up a whole step. And this note to this note, for example, doesn't move, so the opposite of that would be doesn't move. Here, we're going down a whole step, so we're going to go up a whole step. Here, this is a tricky one. So this note was here. So we're going up a minor third to get to there. Let's put that there, and we need to go down a minor third from here. I should be there. Oh, that's weird. But cool. Then That note was here, right? Nope, it was here. So here to here is down a minor third. Oops, that's going to be there. So then down up a minor third is going to be here. See, now my E is no longer my E. So things are getting interesting. It might be because I screwed up. Let's see. This went one, two. One, two, yep, that's right. And then this would be down a minor third. So this is going to be up a minor third. Yeah, I think we did it right. And that's gonna be a whole step. Whole step. So somehow because of this leap, we modulated. And, you know, the way I treat this is that when you screw it up, run with it. Who cares if you transposed it wrong if you like the way it sounds? So maybe I screwed up back there somewhere. Maybe I didn't, but I'm gonna run with it. So this is going to be here. Here, here. Here. So somehow I moved to G from E. But, okay, so now we have the melody upside down. Right? So even though it's upside down, it still definitely has a familiarity to it, right? I still you can recognize that as based on what we were doing. It's getting a little tenuous, though, right? Like, if we did much more to it, it would be hard to recognize. But you can invert things and still keep them recognizable. 36. Motive Transposition: The next one, which is probably the easiest is just transposition. That would be taking the whole thing and moving it up or down. Now, this isn't gonna sound like much to us here, but imagine this. You have the melody like this and you hear it once like this. Okay, then the next time you hear it, you hear this. All right, so it's a little higher. That's something that people would notice. It's not as dramatic as we might like, but it is something you can consider doing. Now one thing you could do is transpose I mean, we have basically two motives here, right? We have the same thing twice already. So you could transpose one over the other. So I might do, like that. Move it to F. From C to F. That'll be a nice transition. Not too weird. And then if I really wanted to be weirder, I could let these last few notes drop back down to C. That'd be kind of fun. Oh, that messes with your head a little bit. But you can transpose, you know, the two halves of it differently, if you want. There we go. So transposition very easy one. It's really just dragging notes around to other areas. 37. Motive Augmentation and Diminution: Okay, so the next one is augmentation and diminution. Now, we've encountered those words before. We know what augmented chords are and we know what diminished chords are. But this is different. What we're talking about here when we talk about motives and melodies in terms of augmented and diminished, we're talking about rhythm. I know that sounds weird, but we're talking about augmenting the rhythm or diminuting is that right? The rhythm. So what that means is basically blowing it up or shrinking it in. So if we augment the rhythm, what we're going to do is, this is a quarter note. We're going to make it a half note, okay? So we're just going to kind of move everything up a step in terms of rhythm. Eighth notes become quarter notes, quarter notes become half notes, half notes become whole notes, et cetera. So now, normally, if we were working in traditional notation, you have to work all this out and it can be actually kind of tricky. But here, I can just do this. There. That was it. I just hit this button, and it doubled the length of everything. Now, this isn't going to sound like much. It's just gonna sound like it's played slower. Right. But if you have other music happening at the same time as that, that music keeps going at the original pace, and then the melody doubles in length. That can be actually a really, really cool effect. It's something that I like to do in my own music. And then you can use diminution also, where basically, it's just gonna go to double time. Oh So it's the opposite of rhythm augmentation. So rhythm diminution would be every quarter note becomes an eighth note, every eighth note becomes a 16th note. Every whole note becomes a half note, I chop the duration of each note in half. So those can be good. You can also do them inconsistently. For example, let's do this. Take just these three notes and diminish them and then scooch this over. We'll do that to that one, too, right? So now we've we've shrunk down the second half of the motive in both places. Doesn't have to be in both places, but I thought it'd sound nice. Alright, I almost sounds like it's got a weird little rush to it in that way. So, again, that can kind of be part of the story that is coming out of the melody. 38. Motive Extension and Truncation: Okay, so, two more. What I want to talk about here is extension and truncation. So what we're gonna do here is we're really just kind of kind of freely extend the melody or freely shorten it. So extension and truncation. Um, so let's do truncation first. Truncation would be like chopping something off. Okay? So let's just do that. So let's say now our melody ends here, right? That's gonna be kind of odd. And that's the end, right? Eave people hanging. That tells something. That makes part of our story. You could chop off a whole bunch more. You could chop off all of this. Watch this. If you've established this as a motive that people are used to hearing, all you really need to do is this. That will say to the listener, Oh, yeah, I recognize this, right? You just need that little bit, and it's just as good as playing the whole thing because they recognize it, and they know that is that motive that we've heard before. So this could be fun. And let me just remind you, you don't want to do these things to the first time you're doing the motive, right? We've played the motive. The listener has heard the motive, and now we're working on the second time the motive comes back, and we're changing it up. That's what all these techniques are doing. If you applied anything to the first time we heard the motive, then people wouldn't know that you did anything to it because it's the first time they're hearing it, right? Um, however, you can use these techniques to help you write a motive. That's totally cool, too. So this is kind of the second time. So we've already heard Mary had a little lamb in this hypothetical piece that we're talking about. And now I just do this. And that's all people need, right? Can I make it even shorter? Can I just do this? Probably. They would probably recognize that. So, that's truncation. Extension could be something like this. Let's make a little extra room here, and let's do this and this and this. So I'm basically gonna repeat this first bar. I'm gonna extend it. Let's add something else here. Let's take advantage of that G so I'm just going to add in some extra stuff, right? So my initial motive is this and then this, and then this, and then it plays out from normal as normal there. But I've added in this and this just to kind of extend it a little bit. Right? So I'm just kind of playing with each little lego block inside of it and teasing it out and building up a little more. So you can just kind of make space, add some extra notes in there, and that can extend it out. So extension and truncation. Chop some stuff off. 39. Motive Fragmentation: Okay, last one. This one we call motive fragmentation. So I'm going to do here is, I'm just going to look for something in this motive that is distinctive like what we were talking about before. In fact, let's use that same thing. So I'm gonna get rid of everything except for this little, you know, first three notes of our scale thing. Right. So I'm gonna treat that as its own little small lego block. And I'm just gonna play with it. Let's stay within the same key here. Gonna move it around a little bit. So all I'm doing is that first little thing. Let's take this one again. All right. Okay, so I just have this three times or I just have this that I've done a whole bunch of times, and I've transposed them. Let's hear what we've got. Right? So even though that's just a little fragment of the motive, the audience should recognize that as familiar if you've given them the motive before. And it'll show you're playing with it. Now, this gives me an idea. I wasn't really planning on doing this, but while I was hearing that, I was like, Oh, I have a good idea. So I'm going to do it. Okay? So I'm going to apply a whole bunch of stuff to this one melody based on this thing that we just came up with. In fact, maybe I should go to a new video just so this isn't confusing. Yeah, let's go to a new video, and then I'm going to show you how to combine multiple things. 40. Combining Transformational Techniques: Okay, so it is very common to combine multiple techniques. So you might, you know, transpose something and augment the rhythm and invert it, you know? Just be careful that you don't get so far away from the original motive that it's unrecognizable. Now, this gave me a kind of a goofy idea that I thought I'd try. So I've done fragmentation here. Now I'm going to do diminution on the rhythm. Oop. So they go fast. I almost want it to be double that. I'm gonna demute it again. Okay, now I'm gonna duplicate that, scoot it over. Cool. Now, I'm gonna lay the original melody on top of it. Let's just do this. Okay? So you see the original melody is the longer notes. I should. Well, let's just hear it. Okay. So because those are all in the same octave, it doesn't work great. Let's extend that out a little bit more. And then let's take this and move it up octave. Cool. So that was rather nice, right? Like, I've got all these fragments popping around, and then I've got the actual original melody buried in there, right? I thought that was kind of cool. I don't know what was up with this note that kept popping out. What's up with that? What's up this note? Huh, weird. Let's hear what we're up. So basically, what I did is used fragmentation to generate an accompaniment to the melody, which is kind of a different thing, but also kind of neat. Um, I like it. Okay, enough on this topic. 41. What Comes Next?: Alright, we have come to the end of P five. So what comes next? There is going to be a Part six. I have it all written out already. It's going to focus really on modulation, and that is the idea of changing keys is part of it. So a lot of people have asked about changing keys within a song, within a track, and how to do that smoothly. There are good ways to do it if you want to do it. But Modulation is actually even more than that. Modulation is, well, if you work in a doll regularly, you know what modulation is. Modulation is, you know, moving from one point to another point. We have you know, we modulate osciators, we modulate filters, we modulate LFOs. We do all that kind of stuff. But in harmony, you can modulate also. So we can modulate dynamics, right? We can go from quiet to loud. We can modulate from keys, like I was just talking about to go from one key to another key. We can modulate tempo. We can modulate a whole any musical element, we can modulate, there's good ways to do it and not so good ways to do it. So we're going to focus on that in P six. So I look forward to seeing you in that class available soon. 42. Thanks for Watching!: Alright, you've reached the end of Part five. I hope this was helpful to you. I hope you're going to be thinking about all of these ideas as you're working on your own tracks. Hopefully, you've got some tracks where you're, you know, stuck. You've got some writer's block, and all of the things we talked about in this class, should be able to help get you out of that and get you to finish those tracks. Thanks for taking this class. Thanks for being a part of the student community, and I will see you in the next one Arios. 43. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my email list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.