Exercises

Music researcher Diana Deutsch discovered a surprising illusion when listening to a snippet of speech over and over. Let's see how we can take advantage of this illusion to discover new melodies.

Whether you're new to writing melodies or looking for new approaches, musical centering is a relatively simple exercise worth trying.

Let's look at some relatively simple techniques for writing a chord progression. These techniques alone can generate countless songs.

Are your chord progressions sounding stale or repetitive? Are you looking for new sounds? Borrowing chords is a great way to expand your options.

There are many ways to write a chorus, but we'll look at 3 great ways to get started.

The verse is the narrative backbone of your song. Let's explore some great ways to write verses!

Practice is the best way to write better songs. But the wrong kind of practice can create bad habits. Let's explore how to practice effectively.

Just as the V pulls toward the I, and the ii pulls toward the V, so does the VI7 pull toward the ii. Let's look at how to created an extended tunnel from these chords.

We've seen how to establish a sense of home. Today we’re going to enter a portal to another world: the world of chords outside the home key.

In this series, we'll look at a variety of secondary dominants and provide exercises you can use to integrate them into your songs. Let's start by considering the magnetic power of seventh chords.

In the third installment of the Light and Shadow mini-series, we look at a strange technique that is sure to bring about surprising results.

In the second installment of the Light and Shadow mini-series, we’re going to go deeper into the idea of writing separate light and shadow parts.

Why choose between writing a song in 4/4 or 3/4 when you can do both at once? Let's experiment with polymeter!

The interplay of light and shadow will help us create interest and surprise in our songs. Today we’ll look at one of the simplest ways to create contrast.

Let's explore the power of the iii chord to shift the mood of our song. We’ll use this as an opportunity to explore the idea of musical questions and answers.

We're going to add another to our arsenal of shadow chords, the ii, and look at how it can be used to create a kind of magnetic tunnel back home.

Composition by subtraction is an idea explored by Brian Eno: sculpt your song out of a mass of tracks, eliminating one track at a time.

In today’s exercise, we’re going to get courageous and explore a whole new environment: the shadowy, mysterious world of the vi (or relative minor) chord.

We can think of the I, IV, and V together as our immediate neighborhood. But changing to IV can feel like starting out on a longer journey.

The most common way to return home musically is to use chords that pull toward the I. And the chord with the strongest magnetic pull home is the V (or dominant) chord.

Let's look at a technique for discovering rhythmic and melodic counterpoint that you might never have written otherwise: invisible layering.

We’re going to start with the simplest possible chord progression possible: a single repeating chord. This will clearly establish a harmonic home.