Compose Yourself!: Songwriting & Creative Musicianship In Four Easy Lessons
Tags: David Alzofon

Improvising a melody, crafting a catchy tune doesn't that take a ton of talent? "Talent helps, but anyone can learn to speak the language of music." That's the message of Compose Yourself, a radically new course in musical creativity inspired by the author's lessons with Jef Raskin, the UC San Diego music professor and Silicon Valley guru who created the Macintosh computer, and renowned jazz guitarist/educator Howard Roberts, founder of Musicians Institute, Los Angeles. If you've ever studied music, you know how cramping theory can be. In contrast, Compose Yourself works like a foreign language course, using dialog games to stimulate your creativity right away and build your musical I.Q. (Imagination Quotient) steadily, day by day. Along the way you learn secrets of rhythm, harmony, and melody, such as the classical forms of time, the rolling wave pattern in pop songs, the emotional power of intervals, the applications of harmonic perspective, the meaning of melody, and the magic of "charm." The 198-page method book was written with intermediate guitarists in mind (all examples are tabbed), but works on any instrument and any musical style. Ideas are copiously illustrated with brief, easy-to-play examples from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, and hundreds of references to modern songs that you can easily find in a couple of clicks on the Internet. In the final lesson, you put it all together to write your own pop song or instrumental. Short on ideas? Not a problem. Compose Yourself offers MC2 ("MC-squared") a secret weapon for effortlessly tapping into your subconscious creative powers. If you're frustrated with music theory, if you want to know how to shape your musical ideas into whole compositions and advance your creativity by quantum leap, then Compose Yourself is for you.