How "The Write Song" Can Benefit You

This course is for people interested in learning more about melody composition. It has a lot of information which may be useful to both the novice and the professional. Even if you’re a professional, we guarantee that you’ll find more than one thing which you can put to use right away. Many people coming to my course have some background in guitar/bass playing, piano/keyboard playing, singing, percussion or have already studied songwriting/composition. If you’re tired of wracking your brain to come up with new stuff and you either don’t come up with enough material you like, just don’t come up with enough music period, or you’d like to come up with more music than you already do, then you are the person I’d like to reach.

Purpose
The purpose of this course is to educate our course takers about how compositions are put together and to provide a method of transforming existing music you already listen to into new material. We’re going to show you techniques that will allow you to take any and all aspects of the music you like, then tweak them to make your own but our focus is going to be on melody. However, you can also use these methods to compose music for the drum kit, bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and keyboard part, as well as music for classical or jazz compositions. You can make the resulting music stylistically similar or entirely different than the original model. It’s up to you. The materials in this course can be used to compose music for pop, rock, metal, punk, classical, country, jazz, urban, rap, hip-hop, world music,…anything you like.

Why this book was written
We all have our favorite music, either on the radio, records, tapes, C.D.’s or on the web. Maybe you know someone who makes up their own music. Maybe you’ve wondered about what composers do or the order of steps involved. This course is a record of the learning I have acquired during my explorations into music composition. I realized in my early attempts to find information about composing music that there was a lack of some of the specific kinds of knowledge necessary to avoid the hit and miss method of my beginning efforts. Part of my problem was that I hadn’t listened to enough music analytically, a skill that’s not easy to acquire by oneself. I highly encourage you to analyze your favorite songs with whatever help you can acquire either through a university class, a knowledgeable friend, composition and songwriting books or private music teacher. I had looked at and listened to a lot of music but didn't know what to look or listen for even after working towards a Bachelors degree in music. Me and a lot of other people thought we knew but we didn't. I read all the books on writing music I could find but there were still some gaps in my knowledge that made composition an inefficient guessing game. Even the books on classical and jazz composition seemed to either leave things out, to lack an organizational scheme, used examples outside of my experience or were more technical than this present course assuming too much familiarity with the content. I’m really excited to share this course with others so they could possess, in one place, the important but elusive information to fill in the gaps left by other writers and teachers.

What you will get
Now I’m going to make some outrageous claims. This course is unique because there are students who are the inspiration behind this course that studied from the largest number of experts and studied more intensively with those experts than any other students who have ever lived. It might be an outrageous claim but it’s true. Now they have become teachers and are ready to teach us. Our new teachers have learned to consistently do what our favorite musicians do: to create new and effective compositions. And do it both quickly and easily. Even better than that, they can explain to us how we can also start doing that right away. I won’t tell you who our new teachers are just yet but it will become clear shortly. They won’t be teaching you everything that is normally taught in university composition courses whether pop/rock, classical or jazz. And yet what you take away will be good enough to make experts and the average listener believe that you too are also an expert. At that moment you will actually BE an expert.

Minimally, what you will need to know
Some knowledge of musical concepts is assumed to be possessed, the definitions of which may not be clear without demonstrations by a mentor in person. I’ve placed definitions to new concepts in close proximity to the words that introduce them and tried to make them as obvious as possible. Every attempt has been made to make definitions clear but because of the technical nature of the content they may not all necessarily be comprehensible to the uninitiated.

Persian Music

Persian Rhythm:

The common rhythms from Persia are Maqsum, which they say is the mother of all the others, Ciftitelli, Andalus, Basmudi, , Baladi, Sayyidii, Sombati, Waaltida, Tsamko, Jaark and Darj. Maqams vary the rhythm of the original melody and improvise new ones.

Persian Melody:

Ragas often have two notes that are emphasized, usually a fifth apart, each appearing in a separate tetrachord. Both Persian and Indian music may have changing tones like the two versions of the melodic minor scale but Indian music never modulates. In Persian music a new tetrachord is substituted for the upper tetrachord and a new scale is constructed. Persian music also has a ground/ drone but it is allowed to modulate.

Persian music has a stop note and a central note that moves through various modulations. It has very infrequent skips and leaps are filled with ornaments. Leaps always occur over a consonant interval and usually at the ends of phrases before going to the next one. Persian music was never just used in the courts. Yes, the courts used the same music as the popular music of the common people.

In Persian music, it's often the case that the scales have tones which are only 1/4 flat instead of real quarter tones/1/2 flat intervals except in Turkey. This does not produce the visual symmetry as I said before. They must be sacrificing the perfect visual symmetry because some other element of the music is affecting it or is more important. I was pondering this when I came to the insight that if there is a B1/2 #, its tone might easily be confused with C or C1/2b. The same with F1/2b and E or E1/2 sharp. Diatonic scales probably favor less flattedness or sharpedness to maintain the distinctions between notes.