The method
How this course is built
Written for a pianist with a guitar, bass, and production background who wants to compose in modern instrumental-leaning virtuosic genres. The teacher is Greg Spero.
Inherited from the source course
These seven rules come from the preface of Understanding Music from a Compositional Perspective. They are not negotiable here either.
- Ear first, then score, then theory
- Nothing is named before it is heard. Nothing is theorized before it is named.
- The exercises are the course
- The prose explains. The exercises teach.
- The keyboard is the harmonic reference tool
- You are a pianist, so the keyboard is also the instrument. Every exercise gets a piano-specific variant.
- Sing
- The inner ear has to generate the sound before the hands find it.
- Repeated listening
- First pass is surface. Second pass is structure. Fifth pass is relationships.
- No original composition until the ear is trained
- The source course spends its first five lessons listening. Part B Module 1 does the same. Composing starts in Module 2.
- The same ear
- A Meshuggah riff and a Bach subject both demonstrate motivic development. The techniques transfer because the ear is the same.
Added for the modern target
Four more, because the music you want to write mostly has no printed score and a lot of unverified folklore around it.
- Transcription replaces the printed score
- For rock, metal, and fusion there is rarely an authoritative score. You transcribe, and the transcription is graded as an analytical artifact.
- The caveat discipline
- Every classical-to-modern comparison states the precise structural parallel and the point where the analogy breaks. A comparison without a breaking point is a slogan.
- Documented sources only
- Modern technique claims cite peer-reviewed analysis, book-length studies, or the composer's own words. Fan lore is labeled as such or left out.
- Compose on the instrument, then off it
- Every module ends with a piece: first at the piano, then arranged for the target ensemble.
The shape of every lesson
- Watch
- Greg's video for the lesson, with the moments to take from it.
- Listen
- Repeated listening before any theory. Sing it, tap it, then look at the score.
- At the piano
- The physical work. Keys, fingerings, voicings, tempos.
- Exercises
- Three to six, each with a testable done-when.
- Compose
- One bounded prompt with hard constraints.
- Checkpoint
- What you must play or show Greg before the next lesson.