In this lesson, we are going to talk about a simple and effective trick to help you writing meaningful, coherent and understandable lyrics. This trick consists in asking yourself three questions: Who is talking? Is the singer talking about his own life or is he the narrator of a story? To whom? Is the songwriter talking to an audience or to a specific person? And why? If a person says something, it should be for a reason. What motivates the singer to speak? What is the purpose of a song? You should constantly keep those three questions in mind during all the writing process. If you find [...]

We have seen in the article Two scales to compose (almost) any melody that composers use scales to build melodies and chords. We will now see that each note of a scale has a particular function, its own characteristic. The role of a note depends on its position within the scale. For example, in the C major Scale: C  D  E  F  G  A  B. C = 1,  D=2,  E=3,  F=4,  G=5,  A=6,  B=7. It means that if we use a different key, every note will have a different purpose. That is why I don't really like the traditional way to learn music that [...]

In this article, we are going to answer one of the most common questions for a musician that doesn’t know music theory yet: how to find chords that sound great with a specific scale (and sound great together). When I learned how it works, I realized that it was way simpler than I was expecting. First, what is a chord? A chord is a minimum of 2 notes played simultaneously, it can also be 3 notes, 4 notes, etc… The definition is as basic as that; a chord can be 10 random notes sounding awful. However, we are now going to talk about the [...]

Somebody that doesn't know music theory may think that composition is complex. Indeed, there are tons of scales, chords, and strange terms, learning all of this must be hard and take forever. Don’t worry, once you have the logic, you realize that is really simpler than it looks. Long music studies are useful for a deep understanding classical music (symphonies, operas …) or for music research. But to compose like Paul McCartney, it requires a lot of creativity and a little knowledge. This blog aims to bring you this "little knowledge”. How to write a melody? A melody is a succession of notes [...]

Hello everyone and welcome to this first course. When I learned how to create music, something struck me: music is exciting but the way it is usually taught is boring. So, I have decided to create this website to make music composition practical, intuitive and adapted to the way people make music today. My goal is to teach you how to create your own songs with as less boring technical stuff as I can. You don't need any prerequisites about music theory or to know how to read a music sheet, you can start from scratch! Lessons are designed to fit any modern music genres and instruments. [...]