I, IV, V, & Beyond: Using Music Theory to play like a pro!

This course is designed for the amateur musician of all styles and abilities who is desperate to enhance their musicianship, by way of the mastery of basic theory, harmony, melody, and ear training. Whether you are a composer, arranger, songwriter, or improviser, this course will teach you how to discover new harmonies and melodies within the music that you create, as well as re-harmonizations within the songs that you love! A strong foundation in basic music theory will allow you to grasp the more advanced concepts by the end of the course, at which time you will not only be creating new and original sounds within music that you perform, but you will be creating new and original sounds within the music that you CREATE as a composer, arranger, songwriter, or and improviser!

This course focuses on the harmonic functions of Tonic, Subdominant, and Dominant (I, IV, V) within the major scale and their expected behaviours and resolutions. By mastering their qualities and tendencies, you will be able to manipulate their behaviours within a harmonic setting, while at the same time, discovering new harmonies and melodies that can lead to or from these chords. This knowledge will strengthen your musicianship as well as your ear training and your awareness within your musical settings, but most of all, you will be making musical decisions along the same lines as the pros that you love! And you will never run out of original material or inspiration, as the manipulation of basic concepts will yield endless possibilities for harmonic progressions.

Check out the lecture previews below, and you will have a better understanding of how the course progresses. We even have a whole section focusing on Classical and Pop progressions that use the very tools that you will be learning here!

Have fun, and I hope that you’ll be happy with the musician that you become after your journey with I, IV, V….And Beyond!

Who this course is for:

• This course is for the amateur musician of any musical style and ability who is frustrated with their inability to improve their musicianship beyond the basic theory that is readily available. Amateurs have never been taught how to implement the theory they have learned into original, creative expressions of music. It is precisely through the implementation and manipulation of basic theory, namely the working principles of melody and harmony guided by ear training, that the amateur musician will learn how to create original sounds based on both knowledge and intuition. Amateurs are usually involved in the most playing opportunities, eg., wedding bands, church ensembles, cover bands, jam bands, etc., and they rely on fakebooks, lead sheets, or video tutorials when they desire to be more creative or exploratory with well-known music. They do not know how to find original sounds, or how to create intros, endings, improvisations within a pre-existing song, or they may not know how to create their own songs, thinking that composition is a difficult task. All of these problems will be solved in this course, and not only will the student discover new sounds to use in their songs, improvisations, or in their bands, but their reaction time to the music surrounding them as well as their musical decision making will be exponentially faster. This course ensures that no matter what the musical setting, that the student will have a fountain of inspirational material to draw from, based on their constant implementation and manipulation of basic theoretical knowledge. The music itself will be the teacher, and the student will have never been as receptive as they will be at the course conclusion to the possibilities awaiting them from the music alone, void of another method, or video, or course. Students will be astounded at their progress in the uses of melody, harmony, and ear training, while studying the simplest method on the market. Students will be applying chords and harmonies to songs that will have them re-harmonizing like the pros!