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Learn how film themes express certain emotions with chromatic chords and changes of key. We cover emotional expressions, voice leading, and harmonic progressions for a wide range of harmonies and modulations, focusing on their film-specific uses. We also explore many uses that are not covered in other sources, like deceptive leading-tone dominants, tritone-polyrooted chords, and modulation cycles. Tailor your use of chromatic chords and modulations to your expressive needs.

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This final entry in the Action-Music Harmony series explores how to create action passages of atonal and quartal chords that express a tonal center. We then bring together the techniques of all four courses in the series to analyze complete cues from classic blockbuster films and learn how to devise your own action cues by using this wide palette of action chords.

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Film Music Themes

Write melodies that mean what you want them to mean. Melodies in tonal music tend to conform to underlying linear patterns that have different emotional meanings when they are elaborated in different ways. By analyzing many of Hollywood’s best-known themes, you’ll learn these basic shapes and how the elaborating techniques can create expressions that are perfectly suited to a theme’s association.

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Learn how 8-bar forms shape the emotional expression of a theme. Go well beyond the classical forms of the sentence and period with 12 different 8-bar forms and their 16-bar versions as well. Examples of each form are drawn from major feature films and at the end of the course, sample compositions compare different forms with given opening ideas.

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By studying many of the greatest themes to come out of Hollywood, this three-lesson course will teach you the most common harmonic progressions in Hollywood film music and the emotional and musical associations they tend to have. Learn how to use harmony to evoke the perfect emotions in your themes!

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Discover rhythmic techniques from some of the best-known themes in film, learn a wealth of techniques for irregular meters from classic blockbuster films, and see how meter combines with mode and tempo to create emotional associations from Hollywood’s best composers!

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Action-Music Harmony in Classic Blockbuster Films

In 4 courses, learn the playbook of techniques from the best-known scores of the late 1970s to the early 2000s.

Learn to write common action chords with more than one tonic. Understand how these dissonant but tonally-based harmonies are used in action scenes for several purposes: scoring long passages over a single chord, emphasizing key moments in the narrative, and expressing common associations.

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Learn the most common harmonies for the other two action scales of hexatonic and Hungarian minor. Then see how scales interact with planing and how octatonic, hexatonic, and Hungarian minor scales combine in sophisticated action music.

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Learn the most common octatonic materials of action music from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, many of which are connected by the “Alpha chord”, a key concept which has never before been applied to film music.

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Musical Skills

Customize your learning of reading music with this comprehensive course, which covers all aspects of basic musical notation, scales, and chords. With nearly 3 hours of video lessons, 750 flashcards, and 220 quiz questions, and the ability to jump to any page in the course at any time, you can focus on the skills that you want to develop.

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Learn how to write diatonic harmony in both a classical “strict style” and a more film-oriented “free style”, and see how the two are combined in cues from well-known film scores. Course material is presented from a compositional point of view, showing not just how a chord resolves, but the progression it appears in and, most importantly, where that progression appears in a phrase. Plus, get Fundamentals of Reading Music absolutely free!

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