The idea
You already know more than you can play. Your ear works, your theory is real, your compositional instinct got ahead of your hands years ago, and the gap between them is what makes your music sound like it says the same thing over and over.
So we are not going to fix your hands and then teach you composition. We are going to run both at once, in a fixed order that never changes: hear it, then find it, then name it. Nothing gets a label before you can hear it. Nothing gets a theory before it has a label. That order is the opposite of how theory is usually taught, and it is deliberate. Rules are descriptions of what earlier composers discovered by hearing. You are going to do the hearing.
The other thing to fix in your head now: the ear that hears a Bach subject is the same ear that hears a Meshuggah riff. Literally the same ear, doing the same work on different material. Everything in Part B rests on that.
Watch
How to make a practice schedule (Greg Spero, Weekly Piano)
- The whole schedule is stated as percentages, not minutes, so it scales to your 30 to 60 minutes without shrinking every block to nothing. If you have an hour, split the two-hour version across two days rather than doing a minute of everything [35:53].
- The blocks in his order: scales, agility exercises, thumb agility, Bach, theory, comping, vocabulary, a new tune, transcribing, soloing. Note which of those you are already doing at zero.
- Thumb agility at [06:01] is the single most relevant drill for your left hand. Thumb parked two octaves away, index finger walking a half step out on each side, then a whole step, then a minor third, then a major third, then repeat with fingers 3, 4, 5.
- The rule attached to it at [07:57]: never go faster than you can play cleanly, because rushing builds a rocky sense of time that you then have to unlearn.
How To Transcribe a Piano Solo
- The tool workflow, start to finish: audio into an app that slows playback, waveform to find the solo, space bar to start and stop from a clicked point.
- The speed ladder: learn the phrase at 50 percent, then 60, 71, and up by ten to full speed, backing up a bar before each attempt.
- The chunking rule: work in four or eight bar phrases, learn the end of the chunk first, then extend backward to its beginning.
- The last layer is feel, and it is the hard one. You will hit 100 percent with the right notes and the wrong placement. Keep going until the placement matches.
Why Every Jazz Pianist Should Learn Bach
- Greg's stated reason for keeping Bach in a jazz routine is not repertoire. At [01:31] it is "to get an understanding of the key bed and where the notes are and how they sound with each other in different context."
- His three pieces are the G minor Gigue [00:09], the Minuet in C minor [00:30], and the Prelude in A minor [00:46].
- That is the same-ear thesis stated as a practice instruction. Bach is where the hand learns geography that then gets used on music Bach never heard.
Listen
Five passes, one dimension each. This protocol comes straight from the source course, Lesson 1, Exercise 1.1, and you will use it in every lesson of Part B, so learn it now.
- Linear. Follow the main line only. Where does it rise, fall, rest, accelerate, repeat.
- Vertical. Ignore the line. What is under it. What is the bass doing. Are inner voices moving.
- Proximity. Only the transitions. Step or leap. Smooth or abrupt.
- Distance. Only the large shape. When material returns, how has it changed. What does the end have to do with the beginning.
- Integrated. All four at once. You will not manage it. Attempt it anyway, because the attempt is the training.
Run the five passes on one track from your own EP, Cloud Speak. Write a paragraph per pass. This is not a self-esteem exercise. Greg's read after hearing it was that you had a lot of consistency and not much movement, and pass 4 is where you will hear that for yourself: the material stays about one thing and does not travel anywhere.
Then run the same five passes on the Bach C major Prelude and on Meshuggah, "Bleed," 0:00 to 0:45. Tap the quarter note through the Meshuggah excerpt with one hand while the riff runs. Sing the Bach's top voice. Both, badly, out loud. Singing forces your inner ear to produce pitches instead of receiving them.
The comparison
Here is the rule that governs every classical-to-modern comparison in this course, and it is the reason this course is trustworthy where a hundred YouTube videos are not.
Every comparison states two things: the exact structural parallel, and the exact point where the analogy breaks. A comparison with no breaking point is a slogan. You will see the break stated in every lesson. If you ever catch one missing, that lesson is wrong.
Worked once, here, so you know what it looks like.
The parallel. Motivic development transfers completely. The source course, Lesson 3, defines a motive as three to seven notes with enough rhythmic and intervallic identity to be recognized when it comes back altered, and lists the operations: fragmentation, transposition, inversion, augmentation, diminution, rhythmic transformation, recontextualization. Those operations do not care what genre they are running in. Lesson 29 shows Sonny Rollins doing exactly them to a calypso melody on "St. Thomas" (1956), and calls it the same developmental rigor Beethoven brings to a development section. A metal riff that returns displaced by an eighth note against a steady cymbal is running the same operation.
Where it breaks. Harmonic syntax does not transfer, and there is a corpus study that proves it. Boddington Jordan and Herbst coded a hundred metal tracks released since 2000, twenty each from five subgenres, and found that progressive metal has no defining harmonic feature at all, tending toward atonal passages, diminished and augmented chords, and non-diatonic progressions, and that it was the least consistent subgenre in the study. So when a lesson tells you a Bach cadence and a metal chorus do the same job, it is lying. Rhythmic and formal technique in progressive metal is systematic and teachable. Its harmony is idiosyncratic per band and must be transcribed, not deduced.
Hold both of those at once and you have the method.
At the piano
Four tools. Set all four up this week.
1. The piano. Treat it as the harmonic reference tool before you treat it as a performance instrument. When a lesson says play this at the keyboard, it means find the notes and hear the sonority, even slowly, even badly. Your Part A daily warm-up does not stop when Part B starts. Slow scales, two octaves, every key, 40 bpm on Pro Metronome, hands separately then together, stay in the routine for the whole program.
2. Sibelius. Buy it and finish the online course from A17 before you need it. Notation is where a motive stops being a feeling and becomes an object you can operate on. You cannot invert something you have not written down.
3. The DAW. Logic, which you already run. Two jobs: transcription playback at reduced speed, and arranging your piano sketches for the target instrumentation. Guitar Pro is retired for this course. Tab hides interval content, and interval content is the material.
4. The transcription rig. Audio slowed and looped, a notation window open beside it, and a rule: every transcription gets engraved. A transcription is an analytical artifact and it gets graded like one. For rock, metal, and fusion there is usually no authoritative score, so your transcription is the score.
One more thing that is not a tool and matters as much. Record every session. You said it yourself: if you are not actively recording the idea, it is gone. A voice memo on the phone is enough.
Exercises
1. The five-pass log
Do. Listen to one Cloud Speak track five times, one dimension per pass, writing a paragraph after each. Repeat on the Bach C major Prelude.
Done when: you have ten paragraphs, and at least three of them name something you had never noticed in your own record.
2. The practice schedule, written down
Do. Watch the schedule video. Build your own version as percentages of the time you actually have, capped at one hour. Split it across two days if a block would drop under five minutes. Print it and put it on the piano.
Done when: every block has a percentage, a minute count, and a named exercise, and the total is at or under your cap.
3. The transcription rig, proven
Do. Load any recording into your slow-down setup. Find a four-bar phrase. Learn the last figure first, extend backward to the phrase start at 50 percent, then ladder 50, 60, 71, 80, 90, 100.
Done when: you play the four bars at full speed from memory, with the recording's placement and not just its pitches.
4. Sing before you play
Do. Take the first phrase of the Bach C major Prelude. Sing the top voice. Then sing the bass. Then play each while singing the other.
Done when: you can sing either voice from memory without the keyboard.
5. The caveat drill
Do. Pick any comparison you have heard made between classical music and metal or prog, anywhere, including from Greg. Write the parallel in one sentence and the break in one sentence. If you cannot write the break, the comparison is unsupported and you throw it out.
Done when: you have three comparisons on paper, each with both halves, and at least one you had to discard.
6. Baseline capture
Do. Record sixty seconds of you improvising at the piano, no preparation, no edits. Label it with today's date and archive it.
Done when: the file exists and is stored where you will find it in nine months.
Compose
The prompt. Eight bars, solo piano, in one mode other than Ionian on a root of your choosing.
The constraints. One three-note motive, stated in bar 1. One goal note, chosen before you write anything, that the eight bars arrive at on the downbeat of bar 8. Every bar after bar 1 contains a recognizable transformation of the motive: inversion, transposition down one scale step, rhythmic augmentation, fragmentation to two notes. No new material. No chords that are not implied by voice-leading between the lines.
Engrave it in Sibelius. Play it. Send Greg a voice note of you playing it.
This is deliberately the same experiment Greg ran with you in the room on 9/6, written down and made permanent. The reason it is here at the start of Part B rather than later is that everything in the next thirty-six lessons is a more sophisticated version of it.
Checkpoint
Before L1:
- Ten five-pass paragraphs written, including at least one honest structural criticism of your own EP.
- A written practice schedule with percentages, capped at one hour, taped where you practice.
- Sibelius installed, the A17 course finished, and one Bach two-part invention engraved from the score.
- One four-bar phrase transcribed to full tempo with matching feel.
- Three comparisons written with both the parallel and the break.
- The eight-bar motive sketch engraved, played, and sent as a voice note.
- The sixty-second baseline improvisation archived.
Read
- Source course, Preface and Lesson 1 (/library/garnett-course.pdf). The method in the author's own words, plus the four dimensions of listening and the five-pass exercise you will run all year. Read the Preface twice.
- Source course, Lesson 3. The motive and its eight development techniques. This is the vocabulary underneath every Part B lesson.
- Source course, Lesson 29. Why classical and jazz technique are one body of practice, with Rollins, Shorter, and Bill Evans as the worked cases. Read it now for the argument, and again after Module 4 for the exercises.
- Boddington Jordan and Herbst 2023 (PDF). Read the progressive metal section. It is the evidence that your target genre has no harmonic common practice, which is why this course teaches you to transcribe rather than to apply a formula.
- Schumann, MTO 27/2 (2021) (full text). Skim the abstract and the "Drip" analysis now. You are not expected to follow it yet. It is here so you can see what a real analytical source looks like, next to the fan lore you will meet online.
- Gould, Behind Bars (Faber, 2011). Reference, not cover to cover. Look things up in it every time you engrave.