J. Anthony Allen argues that imagination is the only essential skill for composing music, and that beginners should start writing immediately instead of waiting for theory training. He debunks the myth that you can't transcribe melodies from your head, and promises to teach idea generation, a practical composition process, and functional music theory through personal stories and examples from his orchestral and film scoring work.
Chapters
Music. The only skill you need is imagination. You don't need to know music theory, music history, music notation, any of that. Just start writing. Just use what you need. Just use what you know. I recently found some music I had written way back before I even knew anything about music. But I had some ideas for some melody. And I, as a little kid, okay, Another misconception I. I hear is that, you know, people say they can't write down what they hear. So somebody plays a melody and you can't write it down. That like what I was just saying before, that's a skill that needs to be practiced and you can learn how to do it. It's kind of the same as what we were just talking about in the previous video, but backwards, right? So in the last one, we were talking about looking at music and hearing it. Now we're talking about hearing, hearing music and writing it down. I wasn't very good at that when I started doing this either. Now I'm pretty good at it, but not perfect. I screw it up. So I'm just pasting this all over the place. Let's start this one over. So just. Just keep on going. Let's put one there, one there, one there. And then we'll start this one over one more time. Okay, Now I just pasted that melody all over the place, and I generated a bunch. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this class. Here's what we're gonna do. In this class, my goal is to demystify the process of writing music. As I'll say in the class. You know, most people think of writing music as, you know, this genius person hiding out in an attic with a grand piano and a big white wig and writing music. They're basically picturing Beethoven. And, you know, Beethoven was a good composer, but that's not how it works in the modern world. Sometimes you just need a way to come up with some good ideas. You need to understand some of the fundamentals of how music works. And then you just gotta hit the ground running and try it. You're going to fail a little bit. You're going to write some stuff that doesn't sound great, and you're going to learn from that. So that's what this class is about. It's about coming up with ideas, getting started, and demystifying the process of writing music. I'm going to tell you a lot of stories about what I do. I'm going to tell you about what some of my friends do, what some of my teachers have done, and then we're going to talk a lot about theory, too. I've got a big chunk in this class about music theory to get us started. It's not a comprehensive music theory class, but there's enough in here to get us off the ground if you don't have much theory background. Primarily, though, we're going to be talking about ideas and process for writing music and getting started writing music. So I hope you decide to join us. My name is Jay. You're going to learn a lot about me in the first couple videos. I'll give you my background, show you some of my music, and talk about some of the orchestras I've worked with and films I've done and things like that. Please jump in. Let's get started right away. It's going to be a really good time, and I'll see you inside the first lecture. Adios.
