As the summer holidays approached, the school encouraged students to gain some experience in their fields. Hence, I decided to conduct a music-related course. Musician or not, everyone is connected to music in some way or the other, but most of them don’t know much about the basics of music. Therefore, I made this course to explain the basics of making a song to anyone who is interested. 

 

The course includes the start-to-finish process of making a song, including the theory, the production and the audio mixing.  It was mainly targeted at beginners. It could consist of people with some background in music wanting to learn more about a different aspect of music such as audio mixing or some with no background in music, interested in learning something new. At the end of the course, irrespective of the person’s background, they should have acquired an idea of the process of making a song that could be applied to relevant scenarios. 

 

The course structure consisted of three main components, Music theory, Music Production and Audio mixing. With 2 sessions for each component over 2 weeks, I covered a lot of ground with the learners. The most amount of effort while making the course went into the music theory section. This is mainly because of 2 reasons. One, I wanted to make the sessions introductory and basic, but a little advanced and unique in some aspects. Two, out of the other components, it required the most preparation beforehand. For music production and audio mixing, I willingly had minimal preparation, by just keeping in mind the concepts I have to cover. This is because I wanted the song-making process to happen in real-time. Preparing for the session would take away the spontaneous nature of the realistic process of producing and mixing a song. Therefore, the final song made was not just by me, but also the learners present in the sessions, as a lot of decisions like ‘what instrument to use,’ ‘how much reverb to add’ and ‘what octave to keep the melody on’ were actually made by the learners. Henceforth, the process was interactive and they could experience song-making first-hand. 

 

In the first session of music theory, we covered the main concepts of harmony and melody.  While covering the basics, such as triad chords, scales and chord progressions, we covered several more advanced concepts such as the tonal system (equal temperament) and resolution. Following this session, for the first music production session, we applied each of these concepts to start making a song. While using concepts from before, such as adding a chord progression, we dived into other music production and composition concepts such as instrumentation, arrangement, composing a melody etc. Finally, for the third session, we explored audio mixing. This session was directly connected to the previous one as we continued working on the same song but focused on other concepts like equalizers, varying frequencies, reverb etc. 

 

The next week, a similar format was followed, except we moved on to other topics that needed to be explored. For the theory session, we explored rhythm and more advanced harmony-related concepts such as 4 note chords. Applying these concepts in music production, the beat became more coherent, the chords sounded richer with the added 4 notes and the song was provided with a better structure. In the final session, I explained one of the most important elements of audio mixing, panning; and we made final changes to get a form of a final product. 

 

The content covered for music theory is present here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CNhaNK_DvRB1RaO8g1DQ3h3iA0OnsztDRjd5Au_flOU/edit?usp=sharing

​