Hey Friend!

I have a confession to make: I'm behind schedule. I had a totally different video planned out, but it just didn't happen. It's all written, though, so stay tuned for that in the next couple of weeks.

I wanted to take this opportunity to share a piece that I finished earlier this year. It was a testament to a philosophy that I will be bringing into this community in the near future: Process.

The piece is for a Piano Trio; piano, violin, and cello and taught me a lot about the proportions of a…

Hey hey!

Apologies for the radio silence. The current pandemic has left me busier than usual (which is common for many in the online space). 

For now, you may only be see a video every other week. But, I'm going to try my hardest to make that content as valuable to you as possible. To that end...

I want to tackle something really controversial today, something that really eats at me whenever I hear it. And maybe you've heard this phrase from someone you know, or even said it to yourself:

"I don't have…

Welcome back to the How To Write A Melody series!

Last week, we covered a method called "Follow The Chords," where we wrote out a chord progression first and then wrote a melody to it. This takes away a lot of options in terms of the notes we can hit that will sound good, which helps us make better use of the ones that do.

This week we're diving right into the deep end and talking about using established forms to write a melody. Forms have been around for a long time and take a bit of front-end music…

Hey Friends!

Last week, we covered an extremely popular and versatile technique for writing melodies. I called it, Follow The Notes. 

Today, we're going to cover another popular technique, one that you may not even know that you're using:

Follow The Chords.

This is a very common technique among songwriters, particularly those who play multi-string instruments capable of playing chords, like keyboard and guitar. While it may seem similar to Follow The Notes, it has some pretty key limitations that will…

Hey Friends, 

For the next part of our "How To Write A Melody" series, we're talking about an extremely common method for writing melodies. In fact, if you've written any amount of music at all, I can almost guarantee you've already used this method.

So, what gives, why talk about it?

Because, when you do something with intention, the result can be extraordinary. 

I like to call this method "Follow The Notes," because that's exactly what this method consists of:

You just start hitting notes and see…

Hey guys!

Welcome to the new Musical Engineering! After taking a couple years off, I decided to get back in the game and pivot to focus more on the in's and out's of songwriting and composing, rather than focusing mostly on audio engineering. Here's why: It's what I'm truly passionate about.

Now, that doesn't mean we won't cover any audio engineering at all; but, we'll focus mostly on composing in a DAW using MIDI, basic recording and editing, but also getting your music––whatever genre it's in––to sound…