About the course | In Depth

Performing musicians practice - all the time. That’s how they get better. But how do you practice if you’re a composer? After you’ve mastered a good level of music theory, and some basic keyboard skills - how do you really start absorbing new techniques & material and move from being an intermediate to professional?

In my experience, there’s two conventional bits of wisdom that professional composers usually say in answer to this: write lots of music on the job and listen to new music all the time.

Both of these are absolutely true and probably the best bits of advice you can get. If you’re not already doing them, stop watching this video and do that solidly for a week and see what happens.

However, my guess is that you’re already doing this, and it’s not answering all your questions. The thing is, most early stage composers get stuck when writing - quite a lot. And it’s really an issue of vocabulary.

Imagine I’m trying to write in french but my level of vocabulary is limited - my writing is not going to be so good - no matter how much I write. Obviously I need to learn more words or standard patterns in the language and then try them out in my writing.

I could also try and read or listen to as much french as possible - but how much do I actually recognize and therefore absorb for my own writing?

This is a perfect analogy for music. How can we write without a basic vocabulary of patterns and how can we emulate what we’re listening to if we can’t understand it?

My hope is that at the end of this course you’ll have built up and continue to be building a powerful skillset at the piano and have a wealth of arranging principles on which to draw from. And my hope is that these two pillars will allow you to express your compositional ideas more fluently and more reliably.

I hope to see you on the inside!