#Fundamentals of musicality how to

Listen to the Podcast – A relatively small number of shows, but very compact in presentation.

Read the Blog – There are over 120 articles devoted to many different topics of composition.

Start with the Start Here Page – This article discusses my philosophy of composition and learning.

I have many resources on this site that are devoted to learning composition: For instance, I recommend learning to read music while learning to play an instrument. Please note that many of these can be done concurrently. But if you don’t have the money right now, I have a stock answer that I send to a lot of people, that think will help you. If you are serious about improving quickly, then you’ll probably get the fastest improvement in my Composition 101 and 201 courses. Who knows, I will probably learn something I didn’t actually know, that I didn’t know.įiled Under: Fundamentals, My Journey, Read, Theory Tagged With: basics, Hindemith, Notation, rhythm To reconnect with the “Elementary” side of music. So my first step in my journey towards becoming a real composer, and not just someone who composes blindly, is to take a step back. How can I talk about plagal cadences or neapolitan chords without the foundations of music theory firmly in place? The First Step

The stuff, that normally students pick up one at a time, over the course of years, instead of hard, consistent study. No the fundamentals I am talking about getting a true understanding of rhythm, meter, notation, intervals, scales, etc. If you grew up learning to play the guitar, and you learned from the internet, probably the basics are the E, D, A and G Chords.Īnd if you learned to play in grade school band, the basics are probably “Hot Cross Buns,” or some other really boring song you never heard of until your parents bought you the “Essential Elements” band book. The basics, I’m sure, mean different things to different people. I am rusty on my musical understanding, ability to sight read and sight sing, tap rhythms… you name it, if it is basic, I probably think I know it, but I really don’t. This is just one example from Paul Hindemith’s Elementary Training For Musicians.Įlementary? Now this is by no means the hardest thing I’ve ever seen written down, and it is definitely not the most difficult in the book, but it is tricky to look at and immediately understand. And you can probably sing what you see, right? Can You Sing and Tap This

#Fundamentals of musicality how to

If you can read music then you probably have a good idea about how to write down what you hear in your head. He was from Austria by the way, and not the softest personality, I was 11, so you can imagine how much I liked my lessons at first.) When I finally got a trumpet teacher, he was not happy. (I say probably, because for the first two years that I played trumpet, I would write the fingerings below the notes, in an attempt to not learn the names. If you play an instrument, then you can probably read music. You want to be able to write down what you hear in your head. I assume your goal in composing music is similar to my goal. Well for this I will turn to some of the ideas from the past in terms of what we should be learning. Composition is a huge field, spanning hundreds, if not thousands of years.