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How To Use Tension And Release In Your Melodies

April 23, 2007 By Graham English

Music, much like life, is fundamentally a swinging pendulum between tension and release. Fortunately, with music, this is easy to represent objectively and to utilize in your music composition. Taking a look at the C major scale, you can see that … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: composing, composing strategies, consonance, counterpoint, dissonance, fundamentals, harmony, HowTo, improvisation, intervals, lessons, melody, music fundamentals, Music Theory, scales, soloing, stability and instability, tension and release, Writing Music

John Lennon Hit Songwriting Teleseminar

April 17, 2007 By Graham English

At this moment, you're just a $20 click away from discovering the Hit Songwriting Secrets of John Lennon... even if you're starting from scratch. April 18th and 19th, 2007 6pm PST/ 8pm CST/ 9pm EST Count me in! Please reserve my tele-slot for … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Events, Seminars Tagged With: chord progressions, chorus, harmony, John Lennon, lyric writing, melody, Samurai Songwriting, Songwriting, songwriting tips

Confusing Music Theory Fundamentals And Cliche

March 28, 2007 By Graham English

Wanna hear something provocative? Check out this quote from an old issue of keyboard magazine. "On this experimental record, I've been trying to explore more jazz harmonies. The thing is -- and I'm gonna piss off a lot of people here -- the II-V-I … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: chord changes, chord progressions, cliche, fundamentals, harmony, jazz harmony, limiting beliefs, Michael Jordan, music fundamentals, Music Theory

The Perfect Song Title – 5 Things To Remember

November 26, 2006 By Graham English

Place Your Song Title At Key Points In The Chorus Your song title is more likely to be remembered if it is placed in the first or last line of the chorus. Place Emphasis On Your Song Title In The Chorus Support your song title by giving it a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: chorus, contrast, harmony, lyric writing, lyrics, melody, rhyme, rhythm, song titles, Songwriting, songwriting techniques, songwriting tips, spotlights, writing lyrics

The Rules and Principles of Counterpoint

August 18, 2006 By Graham English

Counterpoint

These rules of counterpoint are simple and easy to memorize. Use them during the arranging phase of your music producing. Counterpoint: a composition which is written strictly according to technical rules. In earlier times, instead of our modern … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: arranging, chord progressions, composing, composition, consonance, counterpoint, dissonance, fundamentals, harmony, modes, motion, Music Theory, rules, Writing Music

How To Master Musical Textures

August 10, 2006 By Graham English

How To Master Musical Textures

If you need more compositional choices or your music needs more depth, you might want to play with the textural qualities of music. This won't be difficult because I've prepared a textural dictionary for you. Polyphonic, while literally meaning … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: Arnold Schoenberg, bass, composing, composition, contrast, counterpoint, dictionary, harmony, Music Theory, musical textures, polyphonic, polyphony, reference, rhythm

Harmony’s Hidden Geometry Revealed

July 8, 2006 By Graham English

THE GEOMETRY OF MUSICAL CHORDS Dmitri Tymoczko, Princeton University Musical chords have a non-Euclidean geometry that has been exploited by Western composers in many different styles. A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: Dmitri Tymoczko, geometry, harmony, Music Theory, Princeton

How To Hear Interval Quality Distinctions

May 8, 2006 By Graham English

If you can do a good job identifying your basic diatonic intervals (unison, major 2nd, major 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th, major 6th, major 7th, perfect octave), the next logical step is to move on to hearing the distinctions between the different … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: distinctions, Ear Training, harmony, intervals, melody, relative pitch

The Golden Mean in Harmony Part 2: Tritones: The Devil’s interval

April 28, 2006 By Graham English

Tritones: The Devil's musical interval: If you look at the relative stability of each scale degree in Western harmony you'll see that the 4th and 7th are the most instable. In order of stability to instability it looks like this: 1, 5, 3, 6, 2, 4, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: AQAL, consciousness, culture, dissonance, golden mean, golden section, harmony, Integral, intervals, octave, phi, tritone, Western harmony

Songwriting For Busy People

February 10, 2006 By Graham English

Mind Hacks posted how choice is demotivating when there are too many options. "Offer students a choice of 6 essays, rather than 30 essays, for extra-credit and more will take up the opportunity if there is less choice of essay titles - and, what … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Music Education, Prose Tagged With: GarageBand, GTD, harmony, iPod, iTunes, Logic Pro, lyrics, melody, MindHacks, mood markings, music notation, recorded audio, rhythm, song titles, Songwriting, tags, tempo, writing lyrics, Writing Music

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Graham is a singer/songwriter and jazz-trained keyboard player, music producer and studio musician, best-selling author of Logic Pro X For Dummies, and serial entrepreneur.

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