Songwriting & Music Production: The Essential Beginners Guide

1. Intro: Music is something that connects with everyone. No matter who you are, I can almost guarantee you have a favorite artist. You've been to a live show, or you've been moved by a piece of music. So wouldn't it be cool to write your own? I don't know. It sounds pretty complicated, like what chords go together? How do I write decent lyrics? Why do my melodies sound awful? It seems overwhelming, right? But what if I told you that most popular songs are built using simple chord progressions, straightforward hooks, and relatable lyrics? Writing and producing music is way easier than it seems, and I'm really excited to show you how to do it. Hey, friends. How's it going? I hope you're having a great day. I'm Mike. It's really nice to meet you. I'm a musician, artist, producer, director of an award winning music charity, and I'm also a top teacher here on Skillshare. A big welcome here to my songwriting and production class. And today, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about writing great pieces of music. We'll start by learning how to approach writing music and finding inspiration in the face of a blank canvas. We'll then learn about the anatomy of popular songs and the building blocks of music and how to mold them into something special. I'll teach you all about chords and re progressions to craft a motive and meaningful movement in our track. We'll then dive into making drum beats and bass lines to create rhythm, groove, and fullness to our song. We'll break down lyrics and melodies and harmonies to give our track a voice alongside creating catchy hooks that get listeners addicted to your sound. I'll also teach you about how to craft a song from beginning to end, and we'll be including a ton of or progression, drum beats, and song blueprints, so that you can follow along no matter where you're at on your musical journey. At this class, I'm going to be writing and producing a song myself so you can see exactly how we implement each of these topics into a track. Writing and producing music is one of the most fun, gratifying forms of making art, and I'm so excited to share it with you today. So I hope to see they're on the class. 2. Class Project: Hey, friends, how's it going? A massive thank you for joining me here on my songwriting and production class. I really, really hope it's useful for you, and you take a lot of good information away from this, and you feel like a more confident songwriter and producer because of it. But just before we get started, I very quickly want to talk about our class project. So by the end of this class, you're going to be able to write and produce your own incredible sounding tracks. And I would love to hear what you get up to. So the class project is going to be a safe space where we can post any of these ideas, either just to share it with me and the other students on the class, or if you want some more critical feedback on a song or a track or anything you need help with. Sharing R is such an important part of the process, and it can really help to hear other people's takes or opinions on the thing. It can really help you progress in a quicker, more confident way. And I just genuinely would love to hear what you come up with. So anything you want feedback on or you want to put out there. Feel free to send over. I listen to every single thing sent into those class projects. I was get back to them as soon as I can. So if you're at all interested in that, please feel free to use that space. All you need to do is upload your track to YouTube or SoundCloud or anything similar and then post that link into the class project. And if you're not ready to share it with the whole world, you can make a private link, so only me and the people on this class have access to it. Okay. So I'm really excited to hear what you come up with, but let's first learn about how to make the music that you're going to post in the class project. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. There's No Right Way to Write a Song: Okay, so really quickly, let me ask you a question. What does a song sound like? Is it fast or slow or emotional or angry? And obviously, there isn't a correct answer to that question. It could be all of those things, or it could be none of those things. And I asked that because just like there is no right way for a song to sound, there is equally no right way to write a song, which seems counter intuitive, right? You're watching a class about how to write music. But if I was to say, here's how you write a song, we do a verse, chorus structure. We stick into one key. That's how you write a song. That would be very hypocritical of me because some of my favorite music goes completely outside of that. For example, one of my favorite songs, we by Bonnie Ver completely throws the idea of a verse chorus structure out the window and instead uses three varying crazy sections with no hooks or repeating parts. And it's stunning. Ajo by Jimmy Hendrix, uses chords that move outside of one key. Hide and seek by Imogen Heap has basically no production other than a voice going through a synth module. And some of the greatest songwriters of all time have completely varying ways of making music. Some are heavily lyric focused and write all their lyrics before jumping onto any instrument, whereas others will write chord progression and a full of musical arrangement first before even thinking about vocals. But now, if we take a step back for a second, it's obviously super helpful and fun to learn about how big popular songs are made, because a lot of us love that kind of stuff. You know, we want to try and emulate those kind of songs we hear. And doing that is just as valid as going against the grain. But I guess what I'm trying to say with all this is the only thing that really matters is that you like what you're making. And all song writing really is is putting cool sounds together that you like. And that could fit a mold or it could not. I really want you to think about that as we're moving through the class because I'm going to be giving you lots of different tools and methods, but please don't feel like you have to fit into a particular mold. Again, there is no right way to write a song, and the only justification you need is if you like it or not. Let's move on to the next class. 4. Finding Inspiration : So one of the trickiest parts of making music or any kind of art is getting started, putting a pen to that blank bit of paper and finding inspiration somewhere. It can be really intimidating and off putting, not knowing where to start. So how do we resolve this? To answer this, I think we have to first ask ourselves Why? Why do we write songs in the first place? So you probably have the perfect danser in your head already, but just to be clear about it. I think people are drawn to write music because it's such a powerful way to share emotions and feelings and stories, be that the depths of heartbreak or it could be something as simple as how it feels to watch a bird fly through this guy. Imagine for a second your favorite film. Now, take away the music. This will be awkward if your favorite film doesn't have music. But bear with me. Suddenly scenes that had so much depth and emotion suddenly feel flat and lifeless. That's the thing about music. It tells such a story and translates such a feeling in a matter of seconds, and there's something really profound about being the person behind that. That's really key when thinking about starting a piece of art or a piece of music. Feeling or emotion or story am I trying to portray with this bit of music? It could be about a story or an experience you've had, or it could just be based around a sound or a feeling or view that evokes some kind of emotion. So what I want you to do from today is as you go about your day to day life, if a sound or a sight evokes some kind of feeling in you and that could be any kind of feeling. Hot it down. Use a notepad, your camera, voice notes, and audio recordings, anything that can capture that moment that made you feel something. So then when it comes down to writing a song, you're sitting on a massive bank of possibilities and ideas. For example, if you're sitting on the train and the sort of rhythm of the tracks is maybe interesting, Whip your phone out and record that. Or maybe you're watching TV, and a character says a line that resonates with you. Write that down. Maybe the sun goes down one day, and it just makes the sky look beautiful. Take a picture of it. Literally, anything that fires up your imagination or makes you feel something is the perfect jumping off spot to making a piece of art. And let me tell you, it is so much easier writing around a theme or an idea rather than just going in blind. For example, if I said, here's the sound of a forrest, I'll write a song around it. I guarantee your mind subconsciously is already getting an idea on how that would feel and sound. Look around your room right now and pick out an object. Now ask yourself, what would this thing sound like? Again, I think you've got a rough idea on where that's going to go. What would a lamp sound like? You know what I mean? What a fun idea to write a song around. And that's the thing, it doesn't need to be a story about heartbreak or trauma or something really profound. It can just be a feeling. So no matter how silly or insignificant these moments of inspiration are, if it makes you feel something, there's a song there waiting for you. And it's so important that you bring that song to life. Because if you don't, no one will. I'll see them the says. 5. Song Structure: Hey, friends, welcome back. In this next lesson, we're going to talk about song structure or the kind of building blocks that make up most songs. Now, it's important to remember that not all songs use these sections, and they can very much be molded and adapted and used as you like. Now you've probably already heard of all of these terms already, but just to be clear, let's go through them together now. So first up, we have our introduction or our intro. So this sets the tone and introduces the listener to the different musical thematic. Elements of the song. It's often instrumental, but can very well include a melody or a motif that sort of captures the feeling of the track. And this could be a gentle instrumental, like that on your song, Belton John kind of starts with this beautiful piano, so suggesting that it's going to be more of a moving emotional track. It's a little bit funny. Or, you could just slap people in the face with a massive wall of noise like well by Jacob Collier. So next, we have the verse. And this is going to kind of progress the story both lyrically and melodically with the instruments. It's kind of making up a big bulk of the song. It often contains lyrics and melody that vary with each repetition, kind of provides new information with each line. And they often have a more subdued energy compared to the chorus. Sort of verses tend to sort of sit more down here on the energy scale compared to like a chorus, which is more up here. They're kind of like your bread and butter. Not always the most exciting part of a sandwich, but very foundational and important to it. If that makes sense. Next, we have our pre chorus, and this is the part that kind of builds the energy and the anticipation or adds a sense of contrast between the verse and the chorus. The pre chorus can be quite significant and change, say, like the or progressions or the instruments in that section, or it can be very subtle and be like a really cool stand out drum feel like the one in Clint Eastwood by the Grillas. Take you back to the sao Dao ages. Next we have the chorus. Now, I'm sure you already know exactly what this is. It's kind of like the core of the song. It's the bit that everyone remembers, the bit that gets stuck in everyone's head, the part with the most energy and the most life. It often has quite punchy, sometimes simple lyrics that kind of encapsulate the main message of the song. And, it's often very repetitive and very memorable. The bit that kind of everyone sings along to, you know? Sounds like. Sounds like. Like we said earlier, it generally has higher energy levels compared to the verse. Next, we have hooks. So this isn't exactly a section, per se, but rather like an element that we throw into the track. And as you can probably guess, it's like a memorable or catchy element that really stays with the listener. It can be a repeated musical phrase or memorable lyric, or a combination of both, and it serves as a focal point to the track and really contributes to the overall catchines. And found in the chorus, but can be found anywhere in the track. For example, when the song getting started by Sam Fender, he uses this kind of vocal hook in the pre chorus to mark the bridge between the verse and the chorus. Song Ara hook can live on a instrument, and sometimes it can be so strong that it can take the place of the vocal in a chorus, say, for example, Svenation army by white stripes. Coming from a it alone. Oh. So next, we have the bridge. The bridge is there to kind of add variety and contrast to the song. It often introduces new elements that kind of breaks up the verse chorus structure, and they typically happen after the second chorus. They often have different chords and melodies, and they add a refreshing departure from the familiar. So next, we have solos or instrumental breaks, and this is often the part where the instrumentalists can kind of showcase their skills or like a different dynamic to the track. And they can often add a big surge of energy to a track as well. Gravity by John Mayer is a great example of a really effective instrumental break. Last, we have the tro. So this is the sort of marking of the end of the song and the thing that provides that closure or conclusion. And this could just be the repetition of the chorus, or it could be the final strum of a chord, or it could be a fade out, just something to give a satisfying end to the track. Okay. So now that we've learned about the word different sections, how do we build a song with them? And the answer to that is, however you want, there is no right or wrong. However, if you want something a little bit more helpful, here is the blueprint to what the sort of average popular song may look like. So we'll have a four bar intro, 16 bars of the first verse, 4 bars of a pre chorus, chorus for 8 bars, second verse for 8 bars, pre chorus chorus, Bridge that changes things up followed by another chorus. If you're getting started and you're wondering what to aim for, this is a perfect blueprint to ensure that you're going to get something that sounds like a proper song. I will contain this a step further and break down what the average pop song would look like throughout each section. For the sake of this example, I'm going to break this down into a really standardized pop or rock band. Usually, this will comprise of a vocalist, a guitar player, or a keyboard player, bass player, and a drummer. That's a really good place to start. If you're confused about what instruments you should have, actually limiting yourself to just four maybe five tracks is a nice way of reducing the amount of decisions you have to make. It's typical to start with a riff or the use of the track. Usually play a guitar or a piano. The first verse is often quite low energy, all instruments present, but maybe the drum is just on the kick drum or just on the ride. The bass player may be playing really long unbroken notes, and the vocals are introduced that sets the tone of the. Pick up the energy in the chorus, all the instruments going up a gear, more busy baseline, a more aggressive drum pattern. The vocal snaps into the lead hook and starts to hit some of the high notes, and the guitar or the keys can really lay into the chords. The second verse can be quite similar to the first, but we can again pick up the intensity just a little bit. Maybe the drums can be a little bit busier. The base can be a little bit busier. Maybe the vocals just up the aggression a little bit. The second chorus can often be just at the first, again, just really going for it with all of those elements. The bridge can then change things up with some new chords. Base is just going to follow those new chords, and we could have a different drum pattern. Maybe the bridge is a bit more intense, so they can liven up a bit, or equally, maybe it could quiet and down. Or this is where a solo or an instrumental break can take place with the same chords as the chorus. And then the last chorus can be just like the other two. So again, don't use that kind of blueprint if you don't want to. That's just a really rough idea on what you can aim towards if this feels a bit overwhelming. Okay, so hopefully that gives you a good idea on what a song structure can look like, and what will those different terms mean? And now that we know that? We can dive in and start writing some of these sections ourselves. Our seal in the spas. O. 6. Key: Hey, guys, welcome back. So in the snakes lesson, we're going to dip our toe very gently into the world of music theory. I'm sorry, okay. There's no way around it. It's just part of the process. So we're going to talk a little bit about keys. Now, keys are really important when it comes to music production and songwriting. So what are keys? So keys are essentially a group of notes and that work really well together. If you've ever sat down at a keyboard before, tried to play a couple of notes, only for them to sound awful, That's usually because they're not in the same key. But if we know what notes and chords are inside every key, we can play or progressions, and write melodies and baselines, and loans are great stuff really easily. I like to think of it a little bit like language. If you know all the words in the English dictionary, you can speak English, just like if you know all the notes in C major, you can play really well in that key. Knowing what notes, what cores are in each key is super handy when producing and writing music. In music, we have major keys and minor keys. As you may already know, songs written in major keys tend to sound a little bit more happy and uplifting, on the other side, the songs written in minor keys sound a little bit more dark and gloomy. Depending on what kind of mood you want to create, you can pick either major or minor key. But there is a big gray area in the middle. So don't feel like you're too defined by these kinds of keys. In music, there are 12 different notes, and these reflect in our keys. So we have 12 major keys and 12 minor keys. But don't worry. You haven't go go memorizing all the notes and chords in all of these different keys. We're going to work that out as we go. It's going to be much easier than it seems I probase. So out of all of these 24 keys, how do we know what one to pick? Well, to be blunt, it doesn't really matter. Every key is going to sound great. The only real difference is going to be the frequency in which they sit. For example, any song can be played in any key. I'll just sound higher or lower. B T here. Ta here. So if you're a singer or you're working with a vocalist, you'll want to try and pick a key that works well with their vocal range. Sometimes you'll write a gray melody alongside a core progression. But as you go to sing it, you might think, this is a little bit too high for me, in which case, you can just bring it down one key. So from C to C flat, and it'll sound very, very similar. It'll just sit in a slightly different frequency. Another important factor when picking a key is thinking about what kind of instrument you're going to be writing around. So, for example, the keys of C major and A minor work really well on keys or piano for beginners because it uses all of the white notes, none of the black notes. It's really easy to play and work out and understand. Equally, the keys of E and G work really well on guitar because a lot of the open strings are in those keys. More you'll write around different keys, the more you'll notice the ever so slight tonal differences between them, and you might find you favor the kind of tone of D, for example. You may not. There is no right or wrong. You just do whatever you feel is right. As a side note to this, just know that you can absolutely use notes and cords that work outside of a key. It just becomes a little bit more tricky when it comes to arranging but it's still totally doable if you find a core progression that works well outside of the key, you go for it. I like to think of key like stabilizers on a bike. When they're on, you can't really go wrong. You can absolutely take them off and go a bit more crazy, but things may get a little bit more difficult. But it's also important to know that the vast majority of popular songs are written in one key. So if you're a beginner, I highly suggest sticking within one key. Don't want to go too in depth with music theory here, as I made a totally dedicated class about that. If you're confused or you want to know more about it, I suggest checking that out. But essentially, what you really need to know about keys is there a group of chords and notes that sound really good together. But talking about what notes and chords work inside of a key, let's figure that out next. I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Scales: Hey, friends. Welcome back. Next, we're going to talk about scales. I'm sorry. It's really important San and it's important because scales tell us what notes are in every single key. Once we know that, we can write great melodies and leads, and we can build chords, and we can make those coords sound more interesting and lush sounding. So a ton of great stuff revolves around scales. So it's really important to know and understand. If you already know all about scales, feel free to skip this lesson. In case you maybe need a little bit of a reminder or you're a beginner, feel free to keep on watching. A scale is essentially just a sequence of notes that sound good together. And there are loads of different scales all with their own characteristics and sounds. But the most important scales to know are the major and the minor scales. And that's because those scales tell us what notes are in every single major and minor key. And when we know that, we can write, chord progressions, melodies, leads, baselines, just about everything we need to know is inside these scales, and it unlocks so m of what we need to know to write great music. You may notice that the description of what a key is and what a scale is very similar and they're often used interchangeably. The main thing we need to remember with scales is the order in which we play the notes is very important and that will make sense a little bit more later. We're going to figure out major keys and scales first, and we'll come to the minor scales and keys just in a bit. To find any major scale, we need to follow a certain sequence of whole steps and half steps. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, I'll translate it now. A half step is the distance between one note. C and C sharp. One note away from each other, we'd call that a half step. A whole step is the distance of two notes. F C to D, that would be a whole step. In the same vein, the distance between E and F is a half step because there's just one note, and the distance between G and A is a whole step because it's moving two notes. To find our major scale, all we need to do is follow a simple pattern of whole steps and half steps. First, we need to decide what key or what scale we want to work out. Let's use C for this example. We'd find the note of C first. And then we follow the major scale pattern. Which goes are this? Hole, whole half whole, whole whole and a half, and we're back to C there. So we've worked out every single note in the C major scale, and equally, we've worked out every single note that is in the key of C major. We can already use this knowledge to work out leads and melodies in that key of C. And it really helps to know that the one or the root note, what the kind of scale revolves around, is going to act like the home of the scale and the key. If we're playing a lead part, Everything's going to kind of revolve around the C. It's going to feel like home. So that little pattern is so important to remember. So I'm going to put up on the screen here. Please print screen this or note it down as it's going to come into play a lot. Let's try somewhere else to really drill it in. So let's try D. So again, if we want to find the D major scale and all the keys that work in D major, we'd find the key of D and follow that same major scale pattern. Hull Hull, half hole, H half. We've really easily worked out all the notes that work in D major. Now it's really helpful to number the notes in the scale in the order of which we found them, and that's going to come into play a little bit more later. We can use that knowledge to work out every single node in every single major key. But what about minor scales and keys? Just at the major scale, we have a minor scale formula that we can follow, and that will work out again every node in that key. But this time it's going to be minor instead of major. Like before, we're going to find the note, this is going to correspond to our key. Let's again go for C. But instead, we're going to follow the minus scale formula, which goes like this. Ho, half, whole, half, le. And hopefully, you can hear there. It sounds more gloomy and dark and serious, not nearly as happy as the major scale. So now with that knowledge, we can work out every single note in every single major and minor key. And with that, we can already write leads, melodies, and base parts, and it's hard to go wrong. So now we've got there in the bag. Let's learn a little bit more about cares. I'll see in the next lesson. Oh. 8. Chords: Hey, guys, welcome back. So next, we're going to talk about chords. So as you probably already know, chords are kind of like the building blocks to most pieces of music. And without going too into the theory, all they really are is a combination of three or more notes played together at the same time. And in most music, we'll put a string of chords together to create a chord progression, which kind of is the songs like movement and its journey. Now, there are a ton of different chords, and we can stick with them being very simple. Or if we know a little bit more, we can make them sound a little bit more interesting. And as you can tell by that, the chords we choose have a big impact on the kind of tonality. And that in turn very much affects the feeling of a song. So you may know some chords if you're a guitar player or a piano player. But don't worry if you don't. I'm going to leave some tabs and chord sheets here. They'll also be linked in the resources, too. Or you can watch my fantastic music theory class available right now. But don't worry if you don't know how to play an instrument or music theory. A really simple way of creating a core progression without that kind of knowledge is using samples. So there are free sites like band lab sounds or paid alternatives like Lander, Splice, and they're full of incredible sounding core progressions, which you can just drag and drop straight into your project. Take note of the key and the BPM as that's going to relate to your project. If you're using logic and garage band, this is even easier because up on the top right, we have our loops browser, and this is where we can find a ton of different samples. We can look through here, select our instrument or our genre, and find a core progression that is pre made for us. Lovely. All we have to do is drag and drop that into our project, and logic makes it really easy because it fits into the key and the BPM of your existing track. No matter what one you drag in, it's going to work. Perfect. And don't feel like this is cheating. Taking inspiration from samples and other pieces of music is so widely used these days, it's almost like a standard for the rap and grime genre. If you need further proof, that core progression for Clint Eastwood by the Grillas was literally stolen from an old keyboard preset. But anyway, going back to building our own ord, the most basic form of a chord is called a triad, and it's made up of three notes. That's the minimum we need for a chord, three notes. Very quick bit of music theory. To find any chord you want, you just need to follow these couple of steps. First, you'll need to find the note that corresponds to the chord you want, so you want to find C, find the note there. Next, we'll find the major scale, we spoke about last ssson. So, whole, half, who, who, who, half. There are seven notes in the key. Now, to play the major chord, we just have to play the one, three, and five. That is going to make C major. Now, if we want to find the mi version of that cord. All we have to do is flatten the third down one note. Just third note, down one. C minor. Let's try it one more time somewhere else. If we wanted to find the chords in E, we'd first find E, and then we'd find the major scale. Hull half hole, hole hole, half. Then for the major chord, we pay the one, three, and five, and to find the minor chord, we just flatten that third down one note, and there's our E minor. So if you want to keep things easy, you can just stick to these basic major and minor chords. There's really nothing wrong with that. These are the core building blocks to most songs. And as you can probably already guess, major chords sound more happy and uplifting, whereas minor chords sound more gloomy and dark. But most songs use a combination of both major and minor chords in their progression to sort of create a sense of movement and journey. Let's take stand by me, for example. When they're know has come And the land is Dark monitor, and the Mo is the only lad we'll see. As you can tell, I'm not a singer or a piano player, but you notice how he use the E minor in that song, despite it being a happy song, you know. And these basic chords are more than enough to get you songwriting. Take Sharon, for example. He uses the most simple standard chords, and yet he is possibly one of the most successful songwriters of this generation. So if you're happy with those, feel free to move on to the lesson about or progressions. But if you want to learn a little bit more how to make those chords sound a bit more interesting and professional, feel free to watch the next class about fancy chords. I'll see you there. Oh. 9. Fancy Chords: Hey, friends, welcome back. Next, we're going to talk a little bit about fancy chords. Like we learned last lesson, we can play our simple triads that sound really great and are really easy to use in songwriting. However, if we want to make a bit more of a complex professional sound to our chords, we can use a couple of different techniques to make them sound much more rich and interesting. How do we do that? Again, there are so many different kinds of chords. We could go on about it literally all day. I take a whole class about chords if I wanted to. But there are a few in particular that are really, really popular and sound, really great. The first and easiest is what's called a SS chord. Let's you see as the example. Again, if we play the C major scale, number those up. Now there are two different kinds of SS chords, S two and S four. A SS two would be the 12 and fifth of the scale. A SS four would be the one, four and five of the scale. Now, sus chords are really interesting because we're moving away from the third note, I the one that dictates if it's a major or minor chord. A SS chord becomes almost neutral and that it's neither major or minor, and it creates this mystery in sense of ambiguity. That's a fancy word, isn't it? Used in a lot of alternative music for it's muted neutral tone. It's really nice to resolve a SS chord to the major or minor one. For example, kind of feels like it slots back into place. Next, we have seventh chords. These add an extra note on top of our triad and it adds this like richness and tension, which makes them really widely used in a lot of jazz and blues music. We have three main kinds of seventh chords. First is our major seven, to find this, we'd again, C as an example, draw out our major scale, and we'd play the one, three, five, and seven. It creates this quite like rich pretty sounding chord. Next, we have dominant seven. This is very similar. So we'd play one, three, five, but we'd play the minor seven rather than the major one. So all that means is we just move the major seven down one note. That creates a dominant seven. So there's been more tension and intrigue there, isn't there? And lastly, we have the mi seventh. To define this, we play the one third or flat third, the fifth, and the minor seven or the flat seven. That creates C minor chord. Again, very mysterious and dark sounding. And lastly, we have nine chords. I'm a massive fan of nine chords because they sound very beautiful and quite lush. They use two extra notes on top of existing triad. For these nine chords, we actually need to extend past our existing scale. As you can see, we've got one to seven. Now, if we just repeat the exact same pattern, F seven, we go eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 14, if you want to. From this, you may be able to guess that to play the major nine, we play the one, three, five, seven and nine. That would be C major nine. And it just sounds really lush and full in my opinion. Now, we can create a minor nine very simply by taking down the third to the minor third and the seventh to the mi seventh and play that exact same shape. So that would be c minus nine. And that goes for any shape on the keyboard. And I vie C a lot as the example there. Let's try it somewhere else and play around with those different chords. Let's try E. We'd again find the E major scale, and so we'd find E, and we'd go whole, half, who, who, who, half. Now, to play a major chord, we'd find the one, three, and five, to make this minor, we flatten the third, to make this ***, we'd play the 12 and five, if you want to *** two. And to play S four, we'd play the one, four, five. Now, if we return this to a major chord, to make this a major seven, we just want to add on the major seven as well. So one, three, 57. To make this a dominant seven, we'd flatten the seven down one note, and to make it a minus seven, we'd flatten the third down. Now let's return to our major chord. Now to make this a major nine, we'd add on the major seven and the nine. And to make this a minor nine, we'd take down the seven and down the third. And there's our E minus nine. So loads of really interesting chords to play around with there. I know that can feel a little bit overwhelming, so I'm going to leave a sort of cheat sheet here as an easy way to remember all those different ds. On that note, we can also make these chords sound even more interesting by using inversions. Simply put, inversions are just where you change the octave of a note in a chord. Let's take, for example, this C chord. We've got Cs and Gs all over the keyboard. What if I played the E here, the C here and the G here? What would that be? That would also be a C chord because it's the exact same genetic makeup of a C. BC sounds very different to this one. This is what inversions are all about. Let's go to our major chord up here. We can make any chord sound brighter by moving some of the notes up the octave. Let's take this C and put it up here instead. Got a brighter sounding chord there. Equally, if you want to make a darker sounding chord, we've just got to move some of those notes. Let's take this g here instead. It's w and dark, isn't it? Or like we spoke about earlier, we can move these notes really far apart. And make them sound more wide and bigger, you know? And this goes exactly the same for those more complex chords to the ninth and the sevenths, we can really get experimental with widening them up and placing them in different octaves to make them sound a bit different. So, I know there's a lot of information to take on there. And if that feels overwhelming, please don't worry about it. You can very much move on with the class knowing just those basic chords. I thought I throw it in there in case you were interested. But now that we've learned about all these great chords, the next question is, how do we put them together? How do we make core professions? So let's figure it out in the next lesson. I'll see you there. Oh. 10. Chord Progressions: Hey, guys, welcome back. Now that we know a bit more about chords, let's learn about how we can put them together. Like we spoke about last lesson. A Cor progression is what gives a song? It's like journey and movement. Now, while there isn't any right or wrong about how to put chords together, there's a really simple system of making chord progressions sound good really easily. Relates back to our lesson about keys. As you might remember, in every key, there are seven chords that are going to just sound great together. They're used all the time in popular Western music, and it's again, like the bread and butter of or progressions. What chords belong in each key? There are a few different methods to work out what chords are in every key. What I like to do and what I find most effective is use the circular fifths. You may have seen the circular fifth before. It pops up all the time in music and it's used in lows of core ways. But I know this to be confusing, but don't worry, we're only going to use it today to work out how to use core progressions. To find our chords, all we need to do is find our key on the circle And then the five notes surrounding the key, including the key itself, are going to be all the chords that work in that key. Let's take D, for example. If we circle D, and then the five notes surrounding that, we find all six chords in that given key, and we can play these in any order and they're going to sound great. Let me show you. The key of C works really where we guitar. Let's try that. So again, any cords in that key, are going to just work really, really well, no matter what order you put them in. This exact same system goes for the minor keys too. Let's say if you wanted to go for D minor. Pretty poor example, but it gives you an idea. You may be thinking, hang on a second, you said there were seven cords, the work in every key. What's going on there? Which I'd say, very sharp. Well done. Good student. In every key, we had a diminished cord. A diminished cord sounds a little bit like this. Doesn't sound particularly nice. Sounds a little bit strange. And for that reason, they're quite rarely used in a lot of popular music. So a lot of people tend to forget about them. So yeah, don't worry about using those diminished chords unless you're like into jazz or alternative music. But just in case you want to throw that in, there is a circle of fifths that has the diminished chords on the inner ring. So use that as you will. Keep things really easy, we can use the chords inside of that given key in any order, and it's going to sound really great. But let's see you find a really cool chord progression that works outside of one key. How do we think about that? That's again, where the circular fifth is super super handy. Let's think of it like a neighborhood. Let's say pick our key in G. Now, our closest neighbors on the circle are basically our closer friends. The further we get away from our neighborhood, the more things start to clash, and you can either use this to advantage or keep it simple and keep in your neighborhood. So for example, so let's say we're in the key of C, and we want to move outside of that key, go to D, A, E. So we moved well outside of the key there, but it still sounds really great. And they're actually the calls to Hjo by Jimmy Hendrix, which famously sort of moves outside of the key. But does so in a really natural way because again, we're sort of slowly moving outside of the neighborhood for outside of our key, like one step at a time, so it feels really natural. Was if we were to play C to F sharp, you feel how like dissonant and strange that sounds. Now, again, you can use that to your advantage if you want to make something a bit more like striking, but if you want to keep things simple, we can work around our neighborhood. But just be wary that if we move outside of one key, it becomes a little bit more complicated when making melodies and leads and bits like that. So again, if you want to keep things simple, keep it in the key. Okay, so we've done enough theorizing about this. Let's actually start to write some of our music now. 11. Writing Our Own Chord Progression: So I personally really like to start with core progressions. I that's the most natural thing for me. But it's worth bearing in mind that you can start anywhere you want, lyrics, melodies, basslines, drum parts, whatever feels right to you. So when I'm writing core progressions, I don't tend to apply, like a theory to it necessarily. I'll often just take a look at what calls are in a key, and I'll just sort of play around and be guided by what feels right. And again, I'll sort of, like, throw some hammers or just use the guitar in an interesting way to kind of change out from the norm. But what I really like to do, again, for a bit of inspiration and making things sound a bit different is use a capo. I feel like that just changes things up ale bit, maybe. It's a bit of a different dynamic, you know? And again, it's just about finding what kind of inspires you, you know? Suddenly, that call progress in the sound a little bit floppy. Over here, sounds a bit more tight and interesting. Let's try even higher. So I've just picked out four cords in the key of C, all kind of in the key of C. I've upped it to the key with it as A flat, but it's the same cord shapes. And I quite like that. F was kind of interesting and fun. And what I also like to do is play around with the different kind of, like, amps and sounds on the guitar. I was playing on piano. Maybe I'd have a play around with the different sort of key sounds. Let's see what we can find. That's cool. And that one sick. And yeah, just play around until we find something that kind of resonates for bus. So, that one. Sounds wicked. And already, like that sounds making me think of lots of different ideas, and it's get my imagination going. And again, that's what we want to be led by, like, what do we feel? What makes us like react? Sweet. Now we're gonna go more into a melody and lyrics later. But at this kind of point, I think it's really good to sort of play around with, like, humming a melody or something that their vocals could do over the chord you got here. Oh Just to get kind of Doman, see what that kind of idea could sound like or where that song could kind of go. D B Something like that. So I'm feeling really good about that. So I'm just gonna record it straight away while I've got the idea. Cool. I could probably record that more in time, but just for the moment, I just want to get that idea onto paper. All I'm doing there is playing the standard chords, but just moving my fingers on and off to create a different kind of sound. I'm just playing around with that. Now, at this point, I'd like to ask myself, what does that section of sound like? De it sound like more of a sort of catchy bigger chorus, or is it more of a verse kind of thing? When I'm asking myself that sort of question, playing around with either some more chords or a different way of playing them so that I can start to think about how the different sections could work. So, for example, that kind of sounded like a chorus to me. I sounded quite big and open. So maybe for a verse, we could just simplify the way we're playing those exact same chors. And just let them hang. A little bit like that. And that's the thing. We don't need to create a new core progression for every single section. It can very much just be the way we play it or the instruments that we've got present. And to tell you a secret, some of the best songs use the same core progression throughout their track. For example, paint the town red by Doja, one of the most famous songs of 2023, is just two played over and over again in the exact same fashion throughout the whole song. Come Ce Ce simp. Often familiarity and repetition can be really comforting and catchy, hence why it's used all the time in pop music. Another super popular technique is to have the same core progression throughout your verse and chorus be at different intensities and then only change the core progression towards the bridge. For example, I'm in love with you by the 1975. S Sim service with Coming Coming go keeping Keeping. But again, just be guided by what feels right to you. There really is no right or wrong. For me, I'm going to keep the same chords for at the verse and the chorus. I'm just going to vary their level of intensity, and then I'm going to maybe change up towards the bridge. So I'm just gonna play about with some more chords and see if I can work out like a bridge kind of section. So, for example, I've just taken another four chords from our key, and that sounds like it will fit in the same song. They sound in the same kind of neighborhood, but they're changing things up a little bit, so we can use a section like that for our bridge. Great job on this lesson. I'll catch in the next one. 12. BMP & Time Signature: Hey, friends, welcome back. So in this next lesson, I'm going to give you a bit of an introduction into making beats and rhythms. Now, I'm sure you'll already know what this is all about. Beats and rhythm are a fundamental sort of structure in music. They provide a pulse and a sense of timing and rhythm. They can push a song along with pace and energy like 17 going under by Sam Fender. Or they can really drag the feel down and give, like, a lazy swing to things like feel by Jacob Collier. Wow. But before we start dropping some si beats. We first need to talk about metronome. A metronome is simply a beat that keeps us in time. It creates a backbone to record to and the beginnings of like a rhythm. And essentially, all we're doing with drum beats is making a more interesting sounding metronome. We're keeping things in time and giving a backbone to the song while adding interest and dynamics to a track. But to set up a metronome, we need to talk a little bit about BPM and time signature. So BPM stands for beats per minute. You usually see it as a little number at the top of your door. And in its simplest form, essentially, the higher the beats per minute, the faster the song, and equally, the lower the beats per minute, the slower the song. If you're unsure what BPM you may have written your song in, you can download this free app called metro Ter in which you just tap the screen to the beat of your song or the beat of your idea, and it will show you its beats per minute. A lot of today's popular songs tend to be written in the range 90-140 beats per minute. For example, beat it by Michael Jackson, clocks in at 108 BPM. While Dancing Queen by Aber is 100 beats per minute. Many songwriters consider 120 beats per minute to be the perfect tempo to crafting a big popular song, but don't read in that too much. We also need to know about time signature. So this is essentially how many beats are in a bar, and it very much dictates the rhythm of a beat. Now, this topic can very quickly get convoluted and confusing. I can make a whole class about beats and rhythms. I'm just going to keep it really simple today. To cut the crap, you're almost definitely going to be writing in four, four timing, meaning there's four beats per bar. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Literally used all of the time in modern songwriting. In fact, it's actually called the common beat because it's used so often. The absolute legends that is David Bennan analyzed 440 popular songs over the last 20 years, and he found that 94% of them were written in 44 timing. It's just the most natural satisfying sound to a beat. And like I said, if you've written a call progression already, it's probably already in 44 timing. Okay. Sound. Is. Now, the next most common time signature is 34. So this adds a bit of a different rhythm to the beat, so it'll be one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. It tends to feel a little bit more like old fashioned, but it's used in popular songs. Irish by the Google Dolls is a good example of three, four timing. To see. To be welcome. So to generalize, 44 is a bit more contemporary, widely used. It is a bit more driving and upbeat, whereas 34 is a bit more like sweet and sentimental and old fashioned, and has a bit of a nostalgia to it. Okay, so now that's out of the way. Let's talk about writing our own books. 13. Beats: So to boil it down to its simplest form. Most beats are a mix of a low thumpy sound, called the kick and a sharper cracking sound, which is the snare. We have even higher pitch sounds in like a high hat sound or a ride. Sing right at the top of the frequency spectrum. Now, there is an endless amount of drum sounds, both like acoustic and electric, but they're often characterized in these camps of low, medium, and high. You can even say a thump of hitting the table and clapping is like a kick in a snare. And when we play them together, it creates this really rich fall sound because we're utilizing each space on the frequency spectrum. On most kids, we also have crashes to kind of emphasize and make a bit of drama, and we also have toms to make the feels and add a bit of interest into the playing. But most drum sounds really revolve around the kick snare and some sort of high pitch sound, be that a high hat or a ride, something like that. But some songs may just use a kick, or may just use a ride. There again, is no right or wrong. They're just the pillars of beat or a drum sound. Now, if you want the simplest solution to writing beats, we can again use samples. So let's take Apples loops, for example, we could go to instrument, beats and find a beat that is pre made. We can drag that in, and with Apple loops, it's nice because if it's our timing, and we've got a pre made beat there ready for us. Really easy way of doing it and totally valid. So many songs, steel drum beats and samples from other songs. If this is the way you like to work, go for it. Also, some doors will have what's called auto drummer. So this is where the door will read your BPM and your time signature, and it will put out an idea for a drum pattern. So like this, for example, But we can obviously change up the kind of kit that's being used. And we can use this little grid here to kind of change the dynamics of the kit. Make it softer and complex. We can also change what parts of the kit is being used, so we can add some symbols, a tambourine for a bit of extra percussion, and we've got a really cool sounding drum beat in seconds. Or we can take things into our own hands and write our own beats. Now, I'm a drummer, so I often like writing in my own beats. Again, this is a topic that can get quite complicated quite quickly. I'd just like to boil it down to some really simple rules. So I personally first like to focus around just the kick and the snare. These are the really dominant sounds in a beat. By focusing on them first, we get a really strong foundation. Next, I like to write the sort of kick in the snare around the chords or is often the case that the drums and the bass are very closely connected. But because there's quite a strong rhythm here, I'm going to mimic that with the kick in the snare. If we say the chorus for example, It's got this strong da da da da. It's got a strong rhythm there, and I kind of want to accentuate that with the drum beat, so I can kind of mimic the rhythm of that guitar with the kick and the snare. Da da da da da. Let's try the cord. And we've got a beat there that really just fits into that guitar really nicely. But let's say we want to go for something a bit more straightforward. So with our four beats per bar, one, two, three, four. A really standard thing to do is play the kick on the one and the snare on the three. So it's like this. One, two, four, one, two, one, two, four. I sound a little bit more like that. BCO doesn't quite tie into the rhythm as well. So what we can do is actually speed up the way we're counting, which gives us more sort of opportunities to put more beats in. So I was counting the standard beats there. But because this is sort of like a mathematical sum, we can divide up those 4 bars into smaller bars. But all it really comes down to is how fast you count. So for example, 2412 34c an 123412, three, four, one, two, three, four, 1234. If we use the same logic playing on the one and the three, 212 or two et pet for two or 12 floor. So that sounds okay. But if we add another higher pitched instrument, it's going to make this drum sound much wider, so we can either use like a high hat. This is an open high hat sound, closed high hat sound or a ride or a crash if you want to get really aggressive with it. And we can play to the straight rhythm, or we could just get experimental with it. Again, there's really no right or wrong here. T two. And then we've got a much thicker, more interesting drum sound. But I think I preferred the beat we used a minute ago, where I keyed it in with the rhythm, so let's go back to that. So let's experiment with putting a high hat on top of that. And again, without getting too into the sort of like theory behind it, we can either keep this quite straight or just a a bit of riddle to it. It doesn't need to be a scientific equation, you know, go with what feels right. So, for example, that rhythm, I don't think really worked. I actually think just the straighter one works better. There we go. Alternatively, a lot of doors will have a drum sequencer built into them, which looks a little bit like this. Now, if I mute the previous drums, so if I play this that white bar moving across the screen that I saw displaying where the beats are. So although our beat is at 98 beats per minute, like I was saying earlier, we can actually divide these up into even smaller little chunks. I want to I want to want I get even quicker and quicker and technically put in drum beats in all these spaces. So if our example turned on all these high hats, be a bunch of people be b. We're dividing up that 98 beats per minute into smaller little chunks, and we can write in our drums using this. So let's say I wanted to go for a less intense high hat there. And as you can see here, we've got to kick high hat and snare. So again, let's just experiment with what kind of sounds right. Cre quite a cool rhythm there, but almost sounds a little bit saber like, which isn't quite the vibe for this song. This is a really fun way of playing around with rhythm and beats as opposed to playing them in yourselves. Another important topic to talk about is drum feels. In the traditional sense, a drum feel will be where a drummer moves around his kit and does a bit of fancy footwork. It adds a nice bit of contrast to the song, adds a bit of dynamicism into the rhythms and the beats, and it's a really nice way to signify the change between say, like a verse and a chorus. Big drum feel really nicely leads into a change of section. They can be quite lively and energetic. Or they could just change things up a little bit. Again, I just feel like it's really fun to just play around with the different drum sounds and can find something that feels right. For example, the minute our verse chorus. Lead up to the chorus here. Chorus. By putting the drum fill in here, I think we'll just enhance that section a bit more. Let's just have a play around. Really simple idea on snare there. Get a bit more interesting. Something like that, maybe. Again, quite simple. Maybe we could try something a little bit more intricate using the tunnels. I think that's okay for now. I also think a great idea is to really listen to the kind of music that you like, or maybe the music you're trying to emulate and really break down what's happening with their drums and maybe try and recreate them in your own way. A lot of people I know really like starting off writing a song with a beat. And I think that's a really good idea if you're looking to really drive a song, say, like, dance music or rap. Those sort of genres are so led by the beat that starting with a really strong beat or rhythm can be a really good foundational step to get you into those sort of genres. Great job in this lesson guys of catching the next one. Oh. 14. Lyrics: Okay, so next, we're going to talk about lyrics. Super important when it comes to songwriting, as it's obviously all about expressing emotions and telling a story and connecting with your listener on a deeper level, whether you're inspired by love or heartbreak or just the complexities of life. There's a song there wanting to be written about it. So let's explore some ideas on how we can let that story come to the surface. Another topic where there is genuinely no right or wrong, always be led by what feels right to you, but I'm going to go through some ideas that I use all the time to help get some ideas flowing. The first thing I like to do is pick a theme to write our song around. Lie we spoke about earlier. It's much easier to write around an idea as opposed to just trying to come up with something profound off the top of your head. Often those things come from delving around and playing with the idea of a theme. This is where the inspirational list that we spoke about earlier comes into play really well. If you've got a bank of things on your phone, like soundbites, words from a book or anything that has caught your imagination. You can use this as your theme. Let's say I don't know, a bird flying through the sky. That could be the theme you write around. Equally, you might have something that's happened to you recently like a story or something you've had to work through. You can use that as your theme too. But if I'm stuck for a theme, what I really like to do is look at book titles. This might seem a little bit rogue, but just bear with me for a second. The song we're writing is giving me sci fi almost like video game kind of vibes. I'm going to come into Amazon and just type in like sci fi books. We can use these book titles as like themes to write around. For example, like the fifth Science. Again, I can already kind of feel like a song and a story there waiting to be told, or that the space between us, a great name for a song. Again, sort of like words and ideas are coming to mind with that. And So this is a really cool one, the man who fell to earth, a sick name for like an album or a single. And I feel like that kind of title actually falls in quite well with the kind of sound and ideas I've got for the song. So let's use that as an example. So now that we've got a theme or a title in mind, what I'm going to start to do is just write down some simple words that come to mind when I think about that. So the man that felled to Earth. Now, that makes me feel like being alone. Again, sort of like sci fi, kind of vibes. I'm imagining sort of like someone falling into like a cyber punky kind of like neon city. A lot of people we don't know, so, lots of strangers. I'm thinking like nighttime. Again, literally just any words that spring to mind, just write them down. You don't have to use them all. It's just getting our thoughts onto paper. We can also interpret this idea of a man falling to earth as almost like growing up, like being in a place that's like unfamiliar, so we could say something about growing up. Feeling like nothing is real. Idea of wanting to go home or searching home. So we've got some basic ideas there, and I apologize for my poor handwriting. And now next, what I'd like to do is think about some doing words, some nouns, so like driving. Again, imagining this city we're driving, you know, that can make me think of car as well, talking about the man that fell to earth, so we could say about falling, diving, maybe, driving, diving, walking, falling to the Earth and somehow surviving is a bit of a miracle, so we can maybe writing that down too. So once we've got some ideas down, what I'd like to do next to think about how we can sort of connect up some of these words to start making a sentence. For example, grow up and get a car, you know, we spoke about this song sort of being possibly like a bit of a growing of age kind of story. So we could say about that. We could say drive us to a miracle. That's quite a call idea. So grow up, get a car drive me to a miracle or something like that. Again, I can start to write this down. The idea of strangers s makes me think of like shadows. So we can say like shadows, shadows in the night, shadows that aren't real, walking shadows, shadows on the wall. Yeah, could maybe go with that shadows on the wall. We start acting as like these people we don't know. And we could even just expand on some of the words you've put down. So the idea of home really really straightforward but you could just say, I want to go home. Probably some of the most used lyrics of all time. I want to go home. I find this process great because it's so much easier to note down some words that resonate with you rather than trying to write really poetic lines. Someone like me struggles with that kind of stuff. She might be a bit better at it, but I find this really useful. You can just carry on in that fashion, writing down some more words and trying to think about how to connect them up. Or sometimes you'll just write down a word and a line will just come to you. But what's also really nice is to start playing around with the song and listening out for melodies or a way we could sing this as that can often prompt more ideas too. It's really important to know There's no order in which to write a melody or a vocal or lyrics first. It's very much what comes naturally and what feels right. A lot of people like to write the lyrics beforehand. So like to come up with the melody first and then fit in lyrics to them. For me, I quite like to have lyrics in front so I can start to get an idea on how to sing a line or mine it out, but go with whatever you feel is right. I'm going to pull up our track and see if I can just mimic something in there. I by. I'll try Bo. Get a car. German. That kind of idea is cool. You get a D. A. I want Something like that, just to get a rough idea on where things could go. I quite like that mage. I do apologize my very poor vocals. I feel like I have to point out that I'm not a singer, but hopefully that gives you an idea on how a line can be sung. We'll get someone to sing the song probably later, I think. Now, as we're building lyrics, I also think it's quite important to start thinking about the structure of the song. As within the verse, we're going to be more telling the story and things are going to be a bit more like low key. Was the chorus is going to be more of the big fat, catchy, simplistic section, at least for this song. Yeah, just think about that as you're crafting the lyrics. For the verses, I like to think, what's the next step on this story or where is this moving towards growing up, getting a car, driving to a miracle? They're related. We can think about how that story may continue. But for the chorus, I want to start thinking, how do we wrap up this story into a message or what kind of big point do I want to put across if there is any? Again, molding the lyrics to reflect that. Other option to all of this is to just listen to your song and sort of feel out what lyrics might work. So, for example, like this chorus earlier, I was humming st to. I don't know what that means, but just those words came to mind as I was like, humming around with the melody. So sometimes that will happen, too. Again, there's no right way of doing it. I whatever works, then. And another big tip is to really think about what your favorite artists do, and how do they write their lyrics. For example, Bonnie Vers lyrics are super cryptic, and rather than necessarily like telling a really straightforward story, Then he more uses lyrics to kind of, like, evoke feeling and share emotion. And he really likes to use words that sort of conjure up mental images. And he often goes as far as to make up new words that just feel right in the context of the song. She w pit of to is the ball street seis. She ss and s. But hopefully that's given you some ideas to work around. Great job in the sesson. I'll catch in the next month. 15. Melody & Lead: Okay. So next, we're going to talk about melodies and leads. So these are obviously really important as they act as the most memorable parts of the song and often parts that connect to the audience. We write our vocal around a melody, obviously, and that's the part that people really connect to and british sticks with them. We also write melodies on our lead instruments, say like keys or a guitar. These connectors like hooks and add a lot of interest and top end texture to a song too. So for vocal melodies, a lot of people find this process quite natural and they'll just sing along to a core progression or a song and the melodies will just sort of quite naturally flow out for them. Just like we did on the last lesson where I just sort of hummed out an idea over the chorus that sort of just felt right. And if you're one of those people that can do that, I really like just heading in, setting up a vocal track, hitting record, and just going through the song three or four times, just miming, or trying to sing along to words, just getting ideas out of your head into the song. And 90% of it could be rubbish, but I guarantee, you'll pick up little phrases or words or bits that just work really well, which you can hang onto. If you want some more technical advice, we can absolutely break this down. So to write a Mladia lead, we first need to know what notes work nicely together. As we found out, some notes just don't work particularly well together and clash like that. Luckily, we already know how to do this because of our lessons around keys and scales. So we'd again find what note correlates to our key. Again, take C, for example, if we want to find the C major scale, we just follow the pattern who whole half, who who whole half. And if we were using a minor key, we'd use the minor scale, which goes like this, Hull half le le, half whole and all of those notes are going to work great together no matter what order we play them in. And I'm no piano player by a long shot, but because I can work out what notes are in that key, I can sort play around with lead and melody ideas quite easily now that I know what notes work together. So the song we've started to write is in A flat, major. So let's use our major scale to figure out what notes are going to work well in our song. So hole, hole, half, ho, ho, half. And if we want to make things really simple, we can use a set of stickers to easy mark out what notes are in our key, so it's super easy to remember. Thing. So we can start to play around with some riffs or some lead ideas or some vocal melodies, too that work within those notes. Sounds a. Now we can absolutely use notes that work outside of this scale. I don't feel like you have to be trapped in by it. They're just going to sound a little bit more dissonant and. But again, sometimes you can use that to your advantage. So So, not the best idea there, but you see how that date. Oh I was outside of the key, but when used in the right context, it can work. And we can take this a step further and make this scale even more compelling by turning it into the pentatonic scale, which works great with leads and melodies. So the pentatonic scale is incredibly famous as being like the sort of melody and lead machine that has come out with songs like shape of you or your song by Elton John under the bridge by Chili Peppers. So many big melodies are written with the notes inside of the pentatonic scale. In fact, Matt Healey from the 1975 recently went on interview saying I've actually had messages from guitar teachers being like, If I have another student come in, and asked me how to play 1975 stuff. And I have to explain to them, It is just the major pentatonic scale for five albums. It's the most natural, satisfying scale, and it's just almost impossible to sound bad and using it. And what's even better is that it's basically just a simplified version of the major or minor scale. It only uses five notes instead of seven. To find it, all we need to do is remove the fourth and the seventh. No, in any major scale. On the minor scale, we've removed the second and the sixth. So let's just for now remove these. And there we have our pentatonic scale. Sounds really, really lovely. And in case you're interested, here's how you play it on guitar. So feel free to use these scales however feels best to you. You can lean on them a lot or a little. But something I find really useful using the pentatonic scale in particular is to write hooks, using both instruments and vocals. Now, to write a good hook, we need something that's catchy and memorable. So how do we make something catchy and memorable? And the key is simple and repetitive. So what I like to do is pick out three or four notes, and then play around with our song and try and make something that really, like, sticks and almost feels like annoying in how catchy or, like, how repetitive it is. So two, like, really rough ideas there, but hopefully that gives you an idea. Really playing around with three or four notes. Almost trying to imagine it like if you're on the playground as a kid, and you're trying to, like, make up a really annoying sort of chart. Like a in. Kind of sound, you know. A great example of this is bad guide by Billy Iles. She just picks this riff and just drills it and drills it. And it becomes so ingrained in your head, even though it's just one listen that's hard to not memorize and remember. C. Se when it's played on its own, it's almost like insufferable how annoying that is. But it so well in the context of that track. What I really like to do at this point is layer up three or four different melody or lead ideas while we're sort of in the mood. As using different melodies throughout the track, is pretty important. We can get away with having a repetitive core progression. If we're too repetitive with the melodial, it'll become quite stagnant and repetitive. So I once again, apologize my poor vocals, but anyway, for this, I'll just hit record, and I'll just keep playing about with ideas until something starts to stick or I get some good ideas. There's nothing worse than coming up with a good idea and being like, A, was that again? I haven't recorded. So, hit record and just get in whatever you can. G. Get a car. Drive to car. Show D. They don't know me. But I'm a far. A b. That little idea there. D. I quite like that. I'm going to try and add that in there somewhere. So once we've got an idea or two, what I like to do is think, can I make another melody this a bit quicker or a bit slower than the last one, or it be a bit higher pitch or a bit lower pitch and just record them in. This way, we get a big variety in different melody ideas and it's going to make our song sound really dynamic and interesting. So I'm just going to re record that first bit with that new idea in mind. Grow. Get a car. Drive to car. They don't know me. Okay, so that's the rough idea. Terrible, terrible voice, but we're gonna re record them later. I want to go home. I don't mind to stay. But I think that could translate quite well into the vocals, too. And nowhere to spend. Something like that, you know? And again, with any idea, just record it. And nowhere to spend it. And we can just keep going in this fashion, writing little three part or four part hooks or leaves, or they could be multi parts if you want to. But the important bit is that we get them onto paper, we get them into our door, and then we can make sense of them and put them in the right place later if you want to. Or we can sort of work it out now. Again, there's no role or right. Great job on this son guys of catching the next one. 16. Bass: Ta goes welcome back. So next we're going to talk about bass. The bass often gets a bit overlooked like a simplified guitar. But in reality, a base that's a huge amount to bolster up a song and it adds a ton of low end and foundational grounding to its sound. A lot of the time, I try to think of music as trying to fill each sort of space on the frequency spectrum. So the mids are kind of where the keys and the guitars are sitting. The top ing is more of like the vocals and the rifts and the melodies. Low end is filled out with the base. So it's really important when creating a full sounding track to have each of these frequencies filled with something that bass sound is going to add so much richness and feel to the track. We can use the knowledge that we've learned in the last couple of lessons about melodies and scales to work out great baselines because we're just playing the notes that are working in the key. Or again, like we figured out, we can use notes outside of the key, but to keep things really simple, we can just stick with the notes that have been found in our scale. But the big difference with base is that we're going to be playing it on the ptaive below. So it's a little bit higher for a base so we can take it down. Maybe even further. So again, we can play any notes in the scale, and it's going to sound pretty good. However, it's really common for base parts to basically mirror the calls that are being played as it adds a lot of like richness and depth to the sort of sound that's already being made. Which sounds fine, but so many things a bit more interesting. Another really common technique is to balance between the root note and the fifth of the chord that's being played. So for example, the first chord in our song is A flat. So if we were to find the fifth to A flat, so, who, half hole, there would be our five. So we can balance between one and the five to create a more sort of interesting baseline, which will sound a bit like this. B So simply balancing between the root and the fifth, we've made a bit more of like an active, interesting baseline. So let's take what we've learned and now apply it to an actual bass guitar for a bit of a better sound. So for me, I personally would say I play the root notes about 70% of the time, and I try and fill the other 30 with some other more interesting notes. But again, very much depending on what kind of song or what kind of vibe you're trying to create. Now, really quick tip, if you've got a real bass, you can find the fifth of any chord really easily. So if we say take G, for example, if we got two threats, and then down one string, That is always going to be the fifth. It's always going to be the fifth when we move up two threats down one string. And that's the same with the A string as well. Super easy. We can also make the octaive by moving that down another string. Which can create a really cool sound. So I'm going to record some base into the chorus first. And because of the chorus, I want to make sure it's active and busy, as that's obviously the part of the song where we're really trying to raise things and give everything a big push. I'm going to focus around playing the root and the fifth to show you how good a base I can sound just using that simple technique. But I'm also going to try and replicate the rhythm that the chords are being played in, so they kind of like slot together. A little bit like that. As you can hear there, it gives a ton more like body and depth to that section just with a bit low end. Because it has such a big impact on how the song feels, we can use this to our advantage to change how each section feels. Like I said, for the chorus, we really want to pump things up and make things sound more energetic and lively. But we can also use the base to make a more smooth gentle feeling to the verses, which then when they pick up the chorus, just make it sound really really big. That's why it's really common in a lot of say like rock music that the base notes in the verses are just held out. And in the chorus, they're a little bit more active. And in this song, I'm going to try and do a similar kind of thing. I'm going to have a more gentle sounding bass in the verse. But I think I'm going to kind of like mimic the guitar in its melody because I think that could act as quite a nice little bit of difference. Kind of mimicking it for that bit, you know? But let those notes ring out. And then a little bit more energy towards the chorus. And then we can play around with making the second verse maybe a little bit more intense, making the song feeling like it's sort of progressing and changing and growing. Great welcome this lesson, guys. I'll catch you the next song. 17. Harmonies: Hey, guys, welcome back. So in this next lesson, we're going to talk about Harmony Harmony Harmony. Oh, are doing. So at its core, Harmony is using complimentary notes around a melody to create, like a rich pleasing sound. Not that that example was a great show of that. And it can add so much life and emotion to a song and really add emphasis and exaggeration on particular vocal lines. Sleep on the S This is another topic that can get really complicated really fast. So to simplify it and make it just as straightforward as possible. All we need to know is harmony is two or more notes that sound nice together, essentially, which we've already learned about with our chords and our scales. That is harmony. A chord is more or less just a complex three part of harmony. So the most simple and somewhat creative way of doing this is to just pick out our scale and try and find some complimentary notes that go alongside our existing melody. For example, let's write a really simple melody. A working within that same key as our helpful stickers have shown. And now we can put some higher notes over the top of that to give it a bit of lift and energy. So go one octave up. Or we can add lower notes for a sense of warmth and grounding. So something like that. Or we can use both of them to create a wide lush sounding melody. And we can replicate that exact same process put on a vocal to make those beautiful vocal stacks, too. Now, this more experimental way of picking up Harmonies is my favorite as it's most creative and generally you need to follow a process, where you just feel it out as to what works best with you. However, if we want to get more specific with Harmonies and knowing exactly what's going on, we can equally break that down. For this example, I'm going to be using my friend Harriet's voice. We met up yesterday and put some lyrics down on this song. I tried to recall the vocals myself. They just sounded really bad, and no wants to listen to them over and over again. So, we use all the same techniques that we learned about in our lyrics and our melody lessons. And we came up with a little idea for the chorus, and this is what it sounds like. A big still get to play. Don't say hey Jap Do. So I'm sure you'll agree that that's a much better vocal to work with than mine. So let's experiment putting some harmonies on top of that chorus. So there's a specific line in here. Fino So a really nice, like, repetitive hooky line there that I think will work really well with a harmony on top. So the most widely used harmony in most sort of, like, popular music is thirds. So as you can probably guess, this just relates to the third note in our scale, just like when we learn about chords, the first third and fifth, we can be focusing around the third note, which relates back to the melody line. So let's break that down a bit. So if you find the notes that Harriet is singing there. Don't. You drop the bump. A, D, a here. So she's singing G F and D sharp. He. You drop the ba. A here. So all we need to do is find the third notes to G F and D in this scale, and then play them over the top, and it's going to sound like a really lovely, sort of quite typical harmony. So let's switch up the octave and play it down here, so we've got some more room. So the first note in that melody is G. So to find our third, we just need to do part of our major scale, hole hole. So that's going to be the third. However, in this key, we're in A flat. The g is actually a G minor because it uses A sharp. The third in this case would actually be A sharp. If that seems confusing, anytime you find the third, just go up or down until it sounds right if you don't want to word too much about music theory. That would be the first note of our harmony if we're picking out thirds. The next lowe in our melody is F. Again, we'll find the third, whole. It's not on A. It's actually on A flat. So that would be the second note in a melody, and the third note is D sharp, do the same whole hole. Gs in the scale, as we can tell from our stickers. So we've got our melody notes worked out there. So if I was to play that melody over the top. You drop the ball I don't want to hear. Sound natural and pleasing that sounds. Now, if you move that onto a vocal instead, I apologize again for my lame vocals, one, two, one, two, rap the b D one are. So just adds a little bit more depth to that line, you know? And if you're on that sort of really, like, contemporary modern sound, third harmonies are used a lot. However, we can obviously use any harmonies you want. So let's, for example, take fourths. So fourths and fifths tend to sound quite distinctive and they used a lot in like Asian music. So this is what a fourth harmony would sound like. Trap the b one a here a fifth harmony will sound like this. Drop the bala D W a here. God, that's embarrassing. Another option is to use octave harmonies. So this is where you play the exact same melody, just an octave up or down depending on what kind of mood you want to create. They're not as complex or interesting as other harmonies, but you can use that to your advantage, so if you just want to bolster out a line without creating too much sort of noise. Which will sound like this? It's drop the ba D W a here. More comfortable for me singing down there other than that. Fifth one I did a minute ago. That was rough. And I quite like that kind of sound. So I think I'm going to turn myself right down and use that in the track. Drop the file. We want to keep the bird in there. So a lot of work needs doing there in this sort of mixing and making things sound more balanced. But hopefully that gives you an idea on how we can create harmonies, how we can utilize them. Okay, and we are nearly there. So in the next lesson, we're going to tie up everything we've learned in a class and really start to like flesh out and produce the song we started. So I'll see it. 18. Production pt 1: Hey, guys, welcome back. In the next lesson, we're going to take everything we've learned from the class, and we're going to apply into fully producing and writing this song we started. So at the minute, our song starts very abruptly. Slaps in the face with all those instruments, which we can use. But I want to have a bit more a slow introduction to the song and let it breathe a little bit more. I'm going to start with a drone. A drone is basically like elongated note or a humming or some kind of like ambient sound. Creates a bit of a world for our song to exist in. I found this really cool sound on spear fire labs called Hackney angels. It sounds a little bit like that. As you can saw here, it sounds like texture and atmosphere, and it's going to fill in some of the gaps, and I think it's going to work really nicely in the intro. So I'm just going to pick out some notes that work in that key. And we can either loop that throughout the entire song or we could keep it just the intro. Then I want to introduce the guitar first because I feel like it's the main hook or if I that little da da da da. I'm going to record that in for the intro. The sound we've used for that guitar is just so epic that I think it really needs to breathe for a minute. Let's record that in. And hopefully you can hear there that it creates a bit more like atmosphere, introduces that guitar and the main riff to the song. Already starts to drill it into people's heads. And the tone sounds wicked. But it still sounds quite like lonely and empty. So then when we kick in with the bass and the drums, there's a good bit of impact. It feels a little bit more natural rather than just bringing it in out of the blue. Obviously, we move away from the intro into the first verse here. A we spoke about on lessons before. The guitar is playing the exact same chords, but we're just letting the chords ring out rather than making them too busy. Again, we want to keep the verses a bit more low key, so it's just helping with that. And we've still got the little t for the riff in there. We're just letting those cords hang out with a little bit of little notes in between there just to add some interest. And then on the base, we've got a pretty simple baseline. Again, just letting it hang for the most part. And they're just copying the cords that are being played. Again, we're just a note or two here or there just to spice it up a little bit. And then the drums are quite punchy, but we've kept them on a closed high hat, which is this kind of sound to create again a more sort of deadened low intensity section in the verse. And if we to listen to those drums on their own. And to build them, I just sort of used the kick and the snare to emphasize the rhythm that was being played, which altogether sounded like. So if we're sort of following the pattern that we spoke about right at the beginning of the class, we kind of want to make the first verse a little bit longer. I don't have to do that, but in a lot of sort of pop and rock music, that tends to be the case. But in the second half of the first verse, everything is repeated, which is fine. But think to a a being more interest, we can have another instrument in there. And we spoke about before this song kind of feels to me like a sort of video game, futuristic sort of inspire kind of tracks. I want to go for something that sort of in line with that. So that sounds pretty cool. And what I think I'm going to do is add an arpeggiator to that. So don't worry about this too much. This is more like a sort of technical term, but I'm going to select that here. And all an arpegiator does is kind of, like, play the notes that you've got held down in a certain order. And there's loads of different ones on logic. Just by holding those notes down, it's doing some cool stuff. So if we just pick out some notes in our scale. Sounds cool. I think that sounds really interesting and cool. So I'm gonna drop into the second half of the verse when things get a bit repetitive and put that in there. S it sounds. So that just adds a great bit of texture and interest to that part of the song. So then we go into it's kind of like a pre chorus, but essentially all we're doing is like livening up the way we're playing the chords that go into the chorus. So Guitar gets a bit more aggressive. Trump up on the open and high half. And then we go into the chorus. So let's start to break this down. So again, our guitar is playing the exact same chords. We're just doing it in the most like lively hooky kind of fashion. Similar how we played it in the intro. The drums are the exact same as you wrote in the Bats lesson. Following the guitar. D there D there. And the bass is exactly like it was in the bass lesson, too. We're just following the chords and adding in some fifth notes that be of interest. And for that last little section. You can almost say it's like a pre verse section there. But again, we've just livened up the chords for the last little bit, and the drums are kind of mimicking that as well. And now we move into the second verse. So the second verse, I think can be pret similar to the first. I really like the drum pattern we already wrote. So I'm going to paste that in there. Now, let's put some more guitar in there, too. So I'm going to do very similar to what I did in the first verse. Just playing those chords. But just livening them up even more to create more of a lift in the second verse. And again, going from our sort of blueprint, we want to make the second verse a bit shorter and snappier and to try and get straight back into chorus as quick as you can. So something like that's fine. Very similar to the first verse. We're just livening certain bits up a little bit, and making it a bit shorter. And you may have heard there. I also recorded in a little baseline, which is very, very similar to the first verse. Again, using the main s on the guitar, but just making them a bit more lively, throwing some different notes in there. Now, the second verse can be exactly the same as the first. Now, if I was properly writing this for, like, a big release or whatever, I may re record this, but for the sake of time and efficiency, I'm just going to copy and paste a first verse straight over. I'm going to go for the second chorus. Just like the first one. But I think what I'm going to do now is going to a different section to change things up. I think what's going to work really well here is like an instrumental break. I think it's going to let the song be able to, like, properly breathe and dig into that sort of more like rocky element to it. So we're going to copy and paste the exact same chorus chords and just do, see if we can come up with a cool riff on top of the chords. So once again, I'm just going to copy and paste that exact same section. Take those rough demo vocals. That's the thing. Sometimes writing a song can feel really overwhelming, but a lot of it is just that repeating the same section. Although, yes, it's three or 4 minutes of original music, but it's actually like 1.5 minutes because you're basically repeating the verses and you're repeating the chorus usually about three times. You know what I mean? So I'm going to use the knowledge from our melody and our scales and our harmony lessons. I'm going to find the pentatonic scale that links to our key. And every note in that scale is gonna work really well. Play. But I think what I want to do is, like, latch on to the kind of riff that's already there and just emphasize that with, like, a bit of harmony and a bit of melody and sort of essentially like accompany it. And if we play it on the higher cative, it should give it more, like, excitement and life. So I'll show you what I mean. And I'm also going to take the guitar sound we already have and drive it a bit more. Now, there's obviously nothing very complicated. It's just like two or three notes. But again, this idea of wanting to create hooks, and create s's catchy, elevate what's already there. I think that works really well alongside that. 19. Production pt 2: So after our second verse is going to come our bridge or the time where we need to change something up. So I'm going to write some different guitar chords in here. Be we've had two quite big energetic sections here, I think it'd be nice to contrast with a quieter, more gentle one. I also think it'd be cool to change up the chords we're playing. We're using the same four chords, for the whole songs. I think again, just creating a bit of contrast with the bridge and change out from getting too repetitive. I think it's a cool idea. So we can go back to our circle of fifths, look at what chords belong in our key or whatever ones we want, and try and experiment with some new core progressions. P. So I really love the sound of that. So let's just get that recorded in. And I think that leads perfectly back into our chorus. But before that, I just want to add a little bit of instrumentation into this bridge pi. So I quite like keeping this first bit lonely and isolated. But for the second part, just about a bit of Something a bit like that. I think we could add some really simple drums in there just for a bit of extra summing. Just with a kick drum for a bit of mp, and then some symbols for some nice twinkly top end. Very nice. And then here, we can just slap straight back into the chorus, I think. To and I had a little bit more of a gap there just because, you know, just to make things a little bit a bit quirky. T four. I great. And here's another little trick for you. Anytime that I feel like it's a little bit dry, going from a quiet section into a loud one. I quality is a riser. A riser can be basically any sound that sort of that builds or swells upwards. Often people like to reverse cymbals, or if you go into the loops, you can often just type in riser and it's that kind of I'm going into other spurs. Sound. But to be really super cool, I'm going to chop the end of this guitar solo. This All that lovely sound. I'm gonna cut it. I'm gonna copy it. I'm gonna paste it over here, and I'm gonna reverse it, which sounds a little bit like this. And just as a nice, like rise into that last chorus. What I'm going to do is repeat the same two sections that had in the last chorus, so more of the regular chorus and then that sort of instrument, the s we break bit. So have this bit and then go back into that. And now I think we can just end on a really simple I've called from earlier. Creates are really nice ending there. So we've got a great outline there beginning to end of our entire song. Now, you're probably thinking, where are all the vocals. So let's work on that next. So from my last couple of lessons, we came up with some little ideas, some very poorly by myself. Who to miracle So using everything we learned from our lyrics lesson, I put together some more lyrics and words that I think went well. Again, using the techniques we learned about piecing together little blinds and ideas. Really typical. Again, I'm not trying to win the awards for this. So all of my friends are gone. We spoke about being lost in a place or feeling like you're like some kind of alien planet. Nothing makes sense, shadows on the wall, being like strangers. So we can use the melody that we came up with last time and write them in. So let's delete that last take And get something in. Again, bear in mind that I'm going to get this re recorded with my friend Harriett, so I'm sorry if they sound lam. Har Trends are gone. Nothing sends it on. Shots on the w. They don't know me. Grow. Get a car. Drove to bar. Want to go So I'm just using some of the melodies that we worked with last time. Da Da, da da. And we'll just put them together there with the new lyrics. Now, like I said, Harriet sung out a great chorus for us. A a big still get to bed. And again, to make that bigger, we can add in, like, my lower octave. A bi still to play don't say Add a bit more interest there. So we're gonna go into the second verse here. So let's put some vocals into the second verse. It's gonna follow quite a similar melody, actually. I feel like I quite like what we had in the first one. And sometimes repetition is our friend. You know? Go I s. Strangers. T to a bad. Forget more claw spend. And then we're going to go straight back into the second chorus, which is going to be exactly the same as the first. And now we can move on to the bridge. So this is where it sort of breaks down a little bit more have the int to break us. Some drag So again, just coming up with a slightly different melody there using the notes in our scale and some more lyrics. A really really straightforward. Some would drag me away. Locked in. But I don't want to still. Show me away. Oh, God. I can't say f. No love and no money. And we're gonna go back inst the chorus. H Now, you may be a a guess, but I actually came up with this earlier. Shocker. I know. But it's for good reason because I don't feel like I'd be a good teacher if this was the example with my terrible vocals. So I got my friend Harriet to record those melodies and lines. And this is what that sounds like. Oh. Friends of girl. Nothing makes sense at all. Shadows on the world. It's on on me. Hopefully you can agree. So much better than mine. Go to go. D O. Anything on reverbs to c? So sanding great there, much better with Harriet's vocal. Now the last little tip I'm going to give you is to fatten up any sort like vocals in a production. We can use what we call double tracking. This can be done on a ton of different instruments. Guitars use this all the time. Vocals use this all the time. All this really means is that we're performing the part exactly the same, and then we're just layering up different vocal takes or different guitar takes. And we can do loads of different stuff with them, we can pan one to the left and the right. A really common technique is to have the lane vocal centered and to have two slightly different versions off the left and the right. That's what we're going to do with the song today as it makes this really nice, wide fall sound, and it's great for a chorus because it just sort of, like, really thickens up the vocals. So I give you a little before and after. Aoki A big gal. B to stop. Get to play. And now with the double takes. I amok. A big gill. B to stop, get to play. And now, if he adds the my lame octave voice in there as well. A mo gay. A big but still gets it there. Don't say Drop What you do And that's pretty much our song done. We fleshed out every different instrument. We filled in all the different sections, and our song is coming in at 3 minutes and 33 seconds, which is pretty spot on for a sort of pop or rock song. Anything between sort of like three and 4 minutes is like a nice sweet spot. So that is perfect as it is. Now again, we can get more in depth here if we want to add more instruments and go really crazy on more production. There's no end amount of instruments and sounds, we can layer up, we can make this score section even bigger. We say strings and horns if you wanted to. Now, if you've gotten to this stage yourself of writing and producing a song and you want to take it to the next level and really get into the mixing side of things, feel free to check out my mixing class where we go into detail about that. I'm going to give it a really quick, easy mix. And then I'm going to put that in the next lesson to give you an idea on how this would sound with a proper bit of, yeah, time split on the mix, with the compression, and reverb and all that good stuff. Okay, so that brings us up to the last lesson in the class. If you've got this far, you are absolutely smashing it. Thank you so much for bearing with me all this way. Hopefully I haven't got too sick of my voice yet. So let's tie things up in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 20. Final Song: Frantic No make sense at all. I don't it. Oh, we go home. A A big still get to bed. S Drop your file. H i s f. Strange be full bed. Able to spend. A big still today. Drop the fire. Go to the So D L S. Show a big deal. I still get again Drop the f. Go. A 21. Final Class: Oh, Hey, friends, welcome back. So you did it. You can please the class. Thank you so much for sticking out with me all the way. I know these classes can feel quite long and quite daunting sometimes. So genuinely a massive well done for getting all the way through and hit in the end. I really, really hope you've enjoyed it, and you've got some good stuff out of this. I know, for me, songwriting and producing music felt so overwhelming for such a long period of time. So I really hope that I've been able to make things a little bit easier for you, share some topics that maybe seemed a bit daunting before. And hopefully you'll find the process of songwriting and producing a bit more fun and fluid now. Just like to emphasize that if you ever want any feedback on anything you've made, please feel free to send it in to me or equally, if you have any questions about anything we spoke about or anything to do with music, please feel free to ask me. I'd love to have a chat, a big music nerd, and love talking about this sort of stuff. So, feel free to get in touch if you'd like to. And if you did enjoy the class, a positive review would mean the absolute world to me. People like me making these ln classes. Those reviews are honestly like gold dust, and are so greatly appreciated, and it just mas me feel good. So if you're, yeah, good the time and you've enjoyed the class, a positive review really would mean so much. And thank you in advance, if you get time to do that. If you'd like to keep in touch, feel free to add me on Instagram, or you can follow me on the class page, and you'll get updates when I post future classes. And it's been a pleasure to make this class for you. I really, really hope you've enjoyed it, and I will see you very, very soon. Thank you. Have a wonderful day.