In this lesson for beginners, I will teach you how to write your first song. Learning to write music also known as music composition is a good skill to have, even as a singer or instrumentalist.
I find that knowing how to play piano is the most useful since it is easy to visualize the chords and melody. After the lesson, you should check out these videos which will help you better understand chord progressions and key signatures.
Before we write our song, we will review some important topics such as melody, harmony, chords, chord progressions, and some of the basic rules of writing music. There is obviously a lot more to writing music than what is covered in the lesson, but this is a great first lesson for those who have limited experience with composition. Remember that a melody is read from left to right (the part of the song you recognize and hum to yourself), and harmony is the supporting chords and is read up and down. A scale tells you all of the notes that exist in a key. You can build chords on each note of the scale, so you have 7 unique chords just like you have 7 unique notes in a scale. The combination of chords you use is known as a chord progression. One of the most common chords progressions when making a song is I, IV , V, I.
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00:00 Intro
00:19 What You Need to Know
00:55 Melody
01:10 Harmony
01:25 Melody Steps
02:00 Melody Skips
02:35 Melody Leaps
03:25 Chords
04:06 Chord Progressions
05:48 Key Signatures
06:34 Writing Our First Song
14:00 Review: Writing a Song from Scratch
21:09 Get the Notes for This Lesson