In today’s episode of PianoTV we’re going to be looking at melody writing tricks. These tricks all center around non-chord tones – and if that makes no sense to you now, it will soon! With our Songwriting Workshop in full-swing, I’ve had melody on the mind. We talk quite a bit about melody writing in…

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In today’s video, I wanted to talk a bit more about songwriting and share my favorite chord progression of all time. The nice thing about this progression is it’s only two chords, so it’s an incredibly easy one. It’s the i-VI progression – but if you don’t know what that means, fear not, we’ll be…

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I want to start this video on songwriting tips by saying I’m not some authority on songwriting. I’m just sharing tips with you from the perspective of someone who has been writing songs since I was a small child (probably 5 or younger).

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Today we’re going to dip our toes in composition and look at some piano songwriting basics. I’ve written a tune with the very unique title of “Pentatonic Song”, which you can download below. You can learn it, or study it, or use it as a launching point for your own composition. I wanted to build…

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Hey friends! Today we’ll be chatting about pentatonic scales, which is an extremely useful scale to know if you’re into jamming and improvising (even if that’s just something you do by yourself). We’re going to talk about how to figure them out (the theory), listen to a few examples of songs that use them, and…

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Today’s video tackles the common melody embellishment, the appoggiatura. What is an appoggiatura? How do they work, and how do you pronounce them? We’ll figure that all out today, without getting way too technical. In a previous video a long time ago, we talked about how to harmonize a melody with thirds and sixths, to…

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Today’s video is a pretty straight-forward and simple one, but it’s something I see done wrong all the time – and that is note stem direction. As musicians, we read a lot of music, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we know how to notate it. This video doesn’t get into songwriting in the general sense –…

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In today’s video, we’re going to talk about transposing, and why transposing is an essential piano skill. We’ll also talk about how to do it, so you can apply it right away. To accompany this video, I’ll put up a couple graphics that we’ll be using – cheat sheets for major and minor chords. If you’d…

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Hi and welcome to another episode of PianoTV! Today we’re going to do something unusual for this channel, and turn our focus to pop music. We’re going to talk about key changes, also referred to as modulations in pop music, and why they’re so awesome (and sometimes so cheesy). We’ll look at 12 amazing key…

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