After another week has come and gone, we are back to clue you in one what has been going on over at the Point Blank Online’s Electronic Music Composition course. If you missed last weeks introduction to this eight week long feature series, check out that article here. During the second week, we dove further into the introductory ideas of theory and composition that we got familiar with last week. During working hands on with chord progressions, bass lines, and rhythm sections, all the textbook theory that can often seem so boring truly came to life.
Musical theory can often be on of the most tedious and slow crawls many musicians face, even some of the best ones in the world never took the time to properly learn how to read musical notes. PBO’s easily laid out diagrams that are coupled with video explanations of all the written text makes it quite easy to consume and digest the rather complex ideas being told.
After we were told about all the scales, and how to use those scales to make up more complex chords, the instructors started delving further into what you can now do from that foundation. Even skilled producers could pick up tricks on how to really make a bass line come alive, or how one or two extra notes of a chord can make your heart fly. The most useful ideas expressed were the clever ways instructors would get tracks off the ground. Ideas like using Ableton’s wealth of MIDI devices to pluck out a foundation for chords, or build bass lines out of more than just the bottom notes of your chords were some ideas I could instantly bring to my own projects to great effect.
Week Two was also the final week of assignment-free classes. Now that we have all been given a bit of knowledge on how to start composing songs, the next step is to put them to good use by composing a handful of rough sketches. We will all go through a series of one on one Skype calls with the instructors to go over which ideas are the most solid, and form there we can flesh out throughout the course of the class into full fledged tunes.
If this all sounds right up your alley, head over to Point Blank London to check out the wealth of courses this amazing online school has to offer. Until next week, happy producing!