Foundations of Making Music with Guy Michelmore

Explore how harmony shapes mood and melody with diatonic chords, basslines, inversions, and suspensions, using common progressions like 1-5-4 to color a piece.

Create a 16-bar chord progression in C, weave rhythm and a baseline, and grow a simple loop into a structured musical idea at 100 bpm, hinting at melody.

Explore how melody and harmony work together, from building motifs to crafting a complete tune with a clear shape, varying repetition, and functional harmony that returns to the tonic.

Explore how rhythm shapes melody, harmony, and tempo, and how phrasing creates rhythmic identity. Balance expected patterns with the unexpected using varied bar lengths and rubato.

Explore how rhythmic interest arises from on-beat and off-beat contrasts, syncopation, and triplets. Practice applying swing, threes against twos, and varied timing to lift simple beats into lively grooves.

Explore the texture of music, from monophonic through homophonic and polyphonic to heterophonic, and learn how density, range, and arrangement shape your musical character.

Experiment with a simple tune by layering strings, pizzicato, and percussion to build varied textures, tempos, and densities, illustrating how arrangement shapes a great sound.

This course wrap-up highlights fundamentals as the core of great music and invites you to grow as a songwriter and composer through theory and genre-focused courses.