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Compose your own music
How to compose a song; The Basics

You can compose your own music whether you’re a beginner or a pro, and although this is aimed at the piano player you can use these ideas on most instruments and learn how to compose a song; if you want to improve your compositions skills then these simple ideas will help you on your way, I’ll mostly be talking about composing a song starting with a simple chord progression.

OK the first thing to do, is write down a chord progression that you like let’s say, Am, F, C, and G, this is a very popular four chord progression, start off by playing each chord for either two or four beats with your Left Hand and then keep repeating it over and over again, get used to playing the chords, the next step is to pick one note from each chord that you’ll play with your Right Hand, Am has A, C, and E, so you’ll pick one of these notes for Am.

So now you have the main melody notes to compose your own music, lets say you picked E for the Am chord, A for the F chord, G for the C chord and then D for the G chord, if you play each chord with each note for four beats then that’s how much space you’ll have to put in some passing notes, the passing notes don’t have to be notes from the chord as they just pass by, getting you to the next note, but keep within the scale, in this case it’s C

Try and play the passing notes so that they lead you nicely to the next main note, for example from the first chord to the second chord where you play E to A as the main notes; you could play E for 2 beats then F to G which would lead you nicely to the A note; keep the rhythm simple at first and then as your song comes out you can add more complex rhythms.

So you’ve got a basic tune that you’ve composed and it should fit with the chord progression that you’ve picked, this is a great way to compose your own music, and it gets you off to a good start and gives you a nice tune that you can work with and mold into something really beautiful. Now go back and repeat the steps for each run through of the chord progression.

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