J. Anthony Allen teaches music theory for electronic producers using MIDI instead of traditional notation. The course covers chords, melodies, harmonies, and song structure, including a live breakdown of deadmau5's "Ghosts and Stuff." You'll learn how major and minor keys shape chord progressions and write better tracks with deeper theoretical understanding.
Hi, my name is Jay and welcome to Slam Academy.
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I hate every preset I've ever listened to. I just want to like make all my own sounds. You have to have your own sound, otherwise you're not going to stick out.
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Had been more to creating electronic music. Once I stepped into sound design, I was like, this is electronic music. This is like what I envisioned it being like.
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Hey everyone. Welcome to Music Theory for Electronic Music Producers. The original. So in this class, we're going to be covering everything you need to know about music theory from the electronic music producer perspective. We're not going to worry about notes and all that stuff. We're going to be using the MIDI grid to cover just about everything. Okay, so whatever software you're working in, that's what we're going to use to learn how to make chords, melodies, harmonies, songs, whole tracks and all that good stuff. We're going to be doing full analyses of other songs, looking at some other songs, trying to pick apart how they work and look at what they do. Now there's a lot of music theory courses here on Udemy and I want you to know that when it comes to the topic of music theory for electronic music producers, I literally wrote the book on it. Two books actually. First edition, second edition. These are real books. You can get them on Amazon. But don't bother buying these books. Everything that's in those books I cover in this class. So this is just as Good, if not better in many ways than the book, because in this class, you have me as a resource. I respond to all messages every single day. So any questions you have, you can always just write them in a message and I'll get back to you in a maximum of 24 hours. Sometimes much quicker than that. Right now, in this course, we're going to focus on a whole lot of things, but by the end, you'll be able to write songs, tracks. If you're already writing songs and or tracks, you'll be able to make them better by having a more thorough understanding of how music theory works. You'll be able to make more interesting chords, chord progression, whole sections of songs, bass lines, and much, much more. So what I want to do now is show you some excerpts that are of the class. So we're just going to kind of fly through some of the things that I cover in this class, and then from there we'll get started. So I hope you decide to join us. It's a really fun class. Welcome. And here we go. And then the pattern. The second half of the pattern is whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. That makes up the key. Those are all the notes that are going to work in this key. They always will fall into this pattern of whole step, whole step, half step. Any key is an arrangement of major and minor chords and some other ones sometimes. So a chord, a chord progression might sound dark, but still actually being kind of a major key. Now, that being said, if it sounds really dark, it's probably in a minor key. Let's dive in. So in this one, we're gonna be looking at a track by deadmau5. This is a track called Ghosts and Stuff. So let's just hear the first part of the track, and then we'll take a chord progression and find a melody that works on that chord progression. And we'll do it both ways. We'll also. Do I have a melody? How do I figure out what chords to put on there? So we'll do kind of the chicken and the egg thing. Okay, like, I'm here. I've written this song. I've got a verse, right? Like, what should I do for the chorus? Once you know what diatonic chord progressions are, what you can do is you can say, oh, okay, I know seven chords that work in this key. Just. It.
