Courses

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.

Learn More

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.

Learn More

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.

Learn More

Film Music Themes

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.

Learn More

Learn to write melodies that mean what you want them to mean. Extracting techniques from major Hollywood scores, this course shows you how to construct melodies with particular meanings by using a three-stage process: 1) Combining musical associations into the opening figure, 2) Building an overarching backbone structure with the desired expression, and 3) Fleshing that structure out with motives to create a narrative that matches the theme’s association.

Notify Me When Available

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!

Learn More

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!

Learn More

Tonal Harmony

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!

Learn More

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.

Learn More

Join Our Mailing List

Receive an email when a new course or blog post becomes available.

By subscribing, you agree with our Privacy Policy.

Scroll to Top