Starting from scratch, we’ll be taken through a structured process (based on a ‘grid’) to compose a complete tune in 60 minutes, focusing on: the chords, rhythm and song form. The process and approach will be explained in detail. It’s structured but the options are many and it allows for your to inject your own musical taste.
Overview
Improvising, arranging music, writing new songs, collaborating, playing together, making music – if these are your objectives, read on. This session is a practical, hands-on approach to writing a tune, without the need of theory. We use the ‘Grid‘.
Writing songs and tunes is undoubtedy the best way of learning any instrument. The lyrics might come first, maybe a catchy groove, a surpisingly cool chord progression or simply an interesting melody or a combination of any of the above. Or maybe there’s a structured way of creating something from new or adapting an existing tune to give that extra dimension.
We focus on using the ‘grid‘ to provide a structure in writing a tune from scratch in just 60 minutes. This ‘grid’ doesn’t just cover chords that are in the chosen key (i.e. diatonic chords) it looks outside the key and makes for some interesting and inventive choices.
Having chosen a key and a style, we’ll starting from a blank sheet and look at building the chord progressions, putting the song form together and applying a groove. The use of the ‘grid’ and the overall approach will be explained as we’re taken through the entire process.
The ‘grid’ approach avoids any in-depth theory; it gives us a vast number of building blocks that we can knit together based on our own musical taste. Think musical lego! Of course, it’ll help later to understand a bit of the theory, but not in this session.
Needless to say, the full transcription will be made available afterwards. We might touch on possible melodies that could be used on top of the chords but this is really out of scope and will be covered in another pop-up session.
Materials
You’ll receive:
Playing levels
Everyone should pick up something from this session in terms of understanding the basic approach and possibilities. If you can play open chords, tried barre chords and understand a major key and have an appreciation of the I, IV and V then you should be fine.
Pop-up sessions in general
This a new series of 1 hour monthly, pop-up sessions where we’ll delve into subjects and songs that will help us develop as guitar players.
Each session will come with its own PDFs and we’ll take in-lesson Zoom recordings if requested.
These pop-up sessions are aimed at a wide variety of playing levels. This session is for intermediate players and above but lower levels will take something from this session.
Call us for a chat at any time
Whatever level you are, you’ll have lots of takeaways to work on later. If you’d like to go through the course please call or email.