Mastering the Art of Composition: The Greatest Lesson I Can Teach

In this video, I share a clip from one of my recent lessons.

I talk with my student about one of the most important principles needed to write effective music.

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[slashw]

i love learning stuff like this while learning music theory .. cause its just like "nothing really matters if it sounds good" which is why I love music so much . thank you so much for the lesson

[tribbybueno]

its such a unique experience being a self-taught musician of 17 years who learned everything by ear and visuals and then learning the vocab for these previously semi-abstract and unnamed concepts like period/sentence structure for phrasing and chord progressions and sounds. i had no idea there were words that explained stuff like that but i am also not surprised there is. prior to my watching this video it was more like basic patterns for me just ab-ac-ab-cbmodulated-d and applying that to chords, sounds, transitions, structure even, etc.

[zaytres-_-]

I like how you gave both sides of making music and even show how to blend the more “analytical” side and the “Does it SOUND good” side

[whitex]

This is simply one of the most enlightening knowledge I came across the last 50 years of making music. I am baffled.

[TheClassicalSauce]

I think music theory is useful if you're stuck. It helped a lot when I first started, but after a while it almost limited me. The truth is there are no rules other than what your ear and heart tell you is right. Music theory can tell you why something sounds good, but the composer who works from a basis of theory instead of creativity is foreign to me. I think this is why it was getting in my way when I was trying to write after I consumed too much of it. You can be hit with a kind of paralysis of where to go with a piece instead of just focusing on what you're trying to say. You can say something simple or complex, but if you say it well, nobody will care. There's also the danger of being clever for the sake of being clever. Odd time signatures, strange chord progressions that may sound neat, but ultimately don't fit and say nothing other than, "I'm clever, aren't I?

I think now that I've grown a bit that Music Theory should be used by a composer as a writer uses a dictionary or thesaurus. You don't look in a dictionary to figure out what you're trying to write, you use these tools to refine, polish, and say precisely what you intend. Coupled with good judgement, these are useful tools, but they don't write the novel for you.

Thanks for the video!

[mortengu]

Wow, using structures like the sentence structure for more than just the melody is such a powerful concept!

[PeterPepper]

Thank you Sir, underrated content, you really taught me something new, which, considering the 15 years of music making + a pathological YouTube binging habit, is pretty remarkable

[pikupikuseru]

I love this

for a very long time, I felt trapped by the Major and Minor keys. I love the versatility that comes with knowing them, it makes it easy to improv, but I lost something that I had bad when I was first making music in high school-- freedom. It wasn't until... maybe the past year or so that I realized I was crippling myself. Playing or making something out of key sounded bad to me, and I couldn't understand why it sounded good when other people did it.

Doing the same thing over and over in a certain way made me resistant to change, and I could not grow again until I stopped treating Keys and Scales as rules, and just used them as tools.

It took some deprogramming, but I like to think I'm growing again. I'm gonna watch this video more than once, and see what ideas it can help me make. thank you so much!!

[ClaudeYoung]

Thanks so much for this video!!! Totally mind blowing, unlearn the complex and go directly to the pattern / code. Really brilliant presentation!

[AutPen]

This is a great discussion. I particularly liked that the student asked some really good questions and showed a keenness to learn. I wish all students were like that!

[benlemke]

I thought my day was going to be useless; after watching this video, I can say I'm better today than I was yesterday. Thanks for this.

[illiazo]

thank you so much for inspiring me with this video. I was literally stuck with a song I was writing. I could write the melody and the chord progression in no time.. youre a legend!!

[Lalaland.]

After many which to me seem aeons of making music I finally found someone who explains things in a way I can grasp, truly understand and implement in my own music.
I make mainly loop nased music, a.k.a. patterns, now suddenly everything just makes sense. Also I never studied music theory as I found it very convoluted and constraining, not limiting but I never wanted to sound like an educated musician if that makes any sense.
This feels like the time a home-school mentor lifted the veil of math by asking me this simple question do you understand that the X, A or any letter for that matter is actually just a question mark. From that moment I went from a below average math student to an almost overnight solid b to a student.
I am so grateful for this video to have shown up on my feed, thank you dear sir for lifting my personal veil. Thank you for genuinely helping me understand something I have been doing in weird and strange way almost naturally, not in any sort of meaningful way, but this will help me tremendously with my personal progression...
Thank you.
May you have a blessed day.

[revonfyll]

I've discovered this recently and I'm glad someone else brings it up. I've started labelling progressions/melodies/riffs using this system and I'm noticing how much it appears in every style of music. For example, Smoke on the Water riff uses an a/b/a/c pattern. And there are sooo many patterns out there once you start listening for them. Another popular one is a/a/a/b. Enter Sandman riff uses that. It's basically like poetry, there are many ways 4 lines can rhyme together.

Composition is taking a motif and walking it through all the different patterns you know to find the best one. And one element of a song can follow one pattern, while another can be on a different pattern. This is how you create complex things by stacking simple ideas together.

[figmentariumanimation]

Commenting to boost this beautiful video, so excited to get back to my keyboard and put these excellent perspectives into practice!

[nazakomu]

Thanks a lot for this video. For a long time, I've had trouble strictly working under functional harmony since I lean far more into jazzier/modal mixture sound. It does tremendous wonders keeping the mindset that every building block for music at its core are mere patterns, wherein composers feel out all the ways they can "tile" them out, until inevitably giving room for subtle changes or discovery of openings for more unexpected moments which may offer new suggested keys to move into. Atonality has grown tremendously in music over the past couple decades, though unfortunately not as much, the pedagogy for it. For now, it seems the best method for writing this stuff remains following a common tone or two, having a good ear, and relying more on intuition. One certainly benefits to build a repertoire of those intervals which indicate the characteristics of which scale or mode any given chord is being borrowed from!

[gavinpeters]

This is a really great video, and kind of sums up the core of a lot of what I've seen developing in your previous videos. Just want to say thanks - as someone who's been studying outside of formal education, these resources are so valuable. I 100% agree about the pattern thing, but still picked up some great practical ideas.

[danielplainview]

Brilliant insights, especially as it pertains to our evolution playing a role in how we perceive music. Thank you for sharing.

[LianDyogi]

I've been struggling to write film music and because of your video, I understand that it's because I don't know how to make patterns in that genre. When you said "music that meanders" I related to that so much. Haha. So thank you for sharing this and explaining it so simply. I'm going to rewrite some of my pieces now having the pattern concept in mind.

[joebrady]

Awesome video! Love how this can break me out of the same music theory stuff I've been doing forever. Also, you didn't blur the dude out around 25:49