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This is the first of a series of in depth courses of harmony
at the piano. This is not a course to play “by ear”, which is a really weak, amateurish, and inadequate approach. These shortcuts have NEVER worked. At best, the results are
mediocre
. In almost 30 years of studying 3 instruments and every area of music, I have never seen a really solid musician who cannot read music. This is not a course to learn to play 4 chords. This is not a course where there are “no prerequisites”.
For this course, you need to be at least a serious grade 1 or 2 (Abrsm, Trinity College etc) pianist.
The piano don’t need to be your first instrument, but
you need to have practiced the piano seriously for at least a year
.
You have to be able to read music at a basic level, and know your major scales at the piano at least up to 3 flats and two sharps, and all the relative minors.
By the way, being able to read music does NOT means “not using your ear”, which is a very popular, and completely mistaken, belief.
People who read music use their ear all the time, and far better than anyone else, although this is never understood by people who don’t read music, because one cannot understand what he does not know.
So if you do not read music, this course is
not
for you, sorry. I am just being honest.
This is an
intense
harmony course. Don’t be fooled by the “short” duration: I edit out every useless SECOND, indecisions, long pauses, and every uhm, ah, or noises (I myself cannot stand any of these in an online lecture!). There is no “Let’s maybe try that” in this course. Every single thing is decided in advance. I myself never liked “maybe” lessons. My question is: “Does it works, or not? Unless it does, don’t waste my time.”.
It takes me up to 45 minutes to edit a 2 or 3 minutes video. I add text while I speak, which expand explanations further. This course goes
really
fast, and you will often have to stop the video to read the text. I try to cram as much powerful info as I can, AND I don’t want to waste your time with “personal stories” and such rubbish. I don’t fill 7 hours with fluff and waste your time in the process. Lastly, this is not a course you watch once. You will have to review it. There will be things that you probably won’t get immediately: that’s fine, keep them in the back of your mind, but you will have to review everything, and probably multiple times. The good news? This is normal! The best things are not as easy as 1-2-3. But once you learned them, trust me, they are
very, very powerful.
I have seen this really well for myself.
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Learn the TRUE art of harmony from a system that was perfected over 120 years by TOP notch musicians and theorists (they often were both.)
It’s sad. Everywhere I turn, I see products with written on: “The NEW way to learn music” and “The NEW way to learn X instrument”. “No music theory needed!”. “You don’t need to read music!”.
This is all snake oil. A real musician HAS to learn all the above. This is like building a house: build it on sand, and it will go to pieces. And I am not speaking about learning to be a top composer: this training should be done even by songwriters, and pop and rock musicians. Instead, a beginner will spend years trying to “learn” without learning ANYTHING, which always, always ends in failure.
I see lots of teachers telling how to create a minor seventh chord. Then they cannot go any further. But as a famous composer and teacher said: “A chord, taken in isolation, has no meaning. You need at least two to start creating something meaningful”.
These other “teachers” , with their “new” systems, only try to reinvent the wheel, and only a REALLY bad one, which can’t even roll properly!
The reality is, the secrets to learn to be a very solid musician, have been available for CENTURIES. It started in Italy during the Renaissance, and it then developed ENORMOUSLY in Germany and Austria in the 1700’s and 1800’s.
This is a system of harmony that was derived from the works of master musicians such as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the three emperors of classical music. Very acute theorists and musicians (they were both) saw that all these composers, although each were injecting their high dose of personality,
were all following the same harmonic guidelines.
This system turned me from an adult who never touched a musical instrument even as a teenager, to having COMPLETELY mastered electric and classical guitar, got me practicing advanced classical piano. I guarantee that even grade 6 or 7 classical piano, is harder than mastering the electric guitar. I am speaking of course about a VERY secure grade 6 or 7 pianist, not about a weak one. I trained my ear really nicely, and even allows me to write nice tunes while I am staring out of the window! I have HUNDREDS of really nice pieces for 3 instruments, ready to be completed. I learned to open a piano score, and arrange it almost in real time on classical guitar. I learned to harmonize known melodies, or my own, REALLY effectively. No “let’s maybe try this, or maybe that”. I will already know what works, in ADVANCE, and without the instrument!
After I had learned this system by myself, I then took music theory lessons and piano lessons, only to find out that I was the only one in the class who was able to harmonize his own melody very effectively. Even my teachers were impressed. “That’s really good keyboard harmony!”, they said.
I have NEVER believed I did not “need” to learn harmony, music theory, or sight read well at the piano, because I have always trusted that learning these things would pay dividends. And I was right.
Are YOU of the same mind? Are YOU a serious musician, or a serious student, or both? Do YOU want to feel secure in your musical skills, because you KNOW they work, you SAW and HEARD the results? Do YOU want to be confident in yourself, no matter whatever musician is around you?
This system will take time, but it is GUARANTEED to work. All others are the opposite: they give the illusion that you are getting something quickly, but in the end, the results are always highly inadequate. But this system will make you FEARLESS after you learned it. You will be way ahead of all these frankly pathetic “musicians” who keep stumbling in the dark for years, trying to do something that after all, should NOT take years, but a few months at most.
Do YOU want to use the power of harmony and an high level harmonic skill, in YOUR own music? Do YOU want to stop fiddling on the instrument, noodling (this is probably one of the worst “musician’s diseases”) trying to come up with “something that works”, that always turns up to be
mediocre or weak
?
Life is too short for noodling.
And the art of harmony is much more than randomly selecting some chords and sticking them underneath a melody. There are many things you need to consider, and especially, there are many things you’ll KNOW in ADVANCE that they don’t work, or don’t work well, and when you know these things, you can save yourself a ton and a half of time everytime you harmonize a melody or come up with a strong chord progression.
You see, the solid musicians of the past were about not only doing it well, but doing it QUICKLY. Otherwise how could they have written hundreds of musical works? Is it not strange that a Wagner could write an opera of over 5 hours, and most of today’s musicians can’t even read music and put together a short piece that sounds well? We will never be as good as Wagner, BUT we can still be
solid musicians
. And that IS good enough!
Why should you use this chord, but not that one? Why should you use a first inversion here, instead of a root position? How can you take some bare chord and immediately enrich them with suspensions, passing modulations, and all these super effective tools?
This seems all a mystery, but it needs not be. The very best musicians started to examine the works of other musicians, and immediately learned why that music sounded the way it sounded. For example, Bach studied the works of Vivaldi. Beethoven, those of Mozart.
But these were geniuses. They could learn in a short while what the rest of us will take much, much longer, and will only learn a very small fraction of it. We are not geniuses, but we can be the best musicians WE can be. And this is good enough. But anything
less
than that, it is NOT! To me, it is shameful!
PS. You have probably noticed that, unlike some other sellers, I am not selling hundreds of courses (and this is not at all a criticism about them or their courses!). In part this is because I haven’t been too long here on Udemy, but also because I vet the students /customers more, i.e. I do not teach complete beginners (not that there is anything wrong with them), and I never write “This course is for ALL” and “no requirements needed”. This course has requirements, and I am not trying to appeal to all. At all. This basically means that I sell less courses, but also that as a smaller seller I can and will answer to ANY questions you have about anything mentioned in the course. Just post ANY questions in the Q&A section of the course, and I promise I will answer to all, as helpfully as I can. Not only that, the best questions will be examined in a new video!
If I were selling hundreds of courses, I could not answer more than a couple of student’s questions. But because I am a “smaller guy”, I can do what I mentioned above. And that is to your advantage. :)
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