I’m delighted to announce that my new online music theory collaboration with Soundfly is live. It’s called Unlocking the Emotional Power of Chords, and it gives you a practical guide to harmony for creators of contemporary pop, R&B, hip-hop, and EDM. We tie all the abstract music theory concepts to real-world musical usages, showing how you can use particular chord combinations to evoke particular feelings. I worked hard with the team at Soundfly on this over the past few months, and we are super jazzed about it.
Like my previous Soundfly courses, the Theory for Producers series, the chords class is a blend of videos, online interactives and composition/production challenges. The musical examples are songs by people like Adele, Chance the Rapper, and Frank Ocean. You can download the MIDI files for each example, stick them in your DAW, and dive right into hands-on music making.
Unlike Theory for Producers, students in the chord class will be getting individualized attention from instructors–the first round will be led by Martin Fowler, Soundfly’s producer on the course and an even deeper theory geek than me. Also unlike Theory for Producers, the new class is not free. But we made sure you’re going to get your money’s worth.
If you’re interested, you can check out a preview of the course. You can get a sense of the approach from this post analyzing “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley. Or you can try Theory for Producers for free, which will also conveniently give you all the prerequisite knowledge you’ll need for the chords class. Happy learning.