CHORDS & SCALES

Straightforward music theory for all,

Take the mystery out of music theory and give your tracks the ultimate musical power-up with the computer musician’s definitive crash course

An unforgettable vocal melody. A moving chord sequence. An infectious bassline. Nailing just one of these could leave your listeners humming your tunes and whistling your melodies, eager for their next hit of your audio crack. Back it up with a killer production, and you could have another kind of hit on your hands!

But the truth is that many computer musicians put the technical side of production first. With sonic standards always evolving, and endless plugins and techniques to master, why wouldn’t you? Well, see it from the listener’s point of view: they can’t sing along to sidechain compression or dance to multiband distortion!

To keep your listeners coming back for ‘just one more listen’, you’ll need to hook ’em with a catchy combination of notes. So how’s it done? Do we just hit keys at random until a great tune pops out? Well, you could, but there’s an easier, faster way, and that’s by using tried-and-tested note combos as a guide. Yep, chords and scales!

Now, if there’s a two-word phrase guaranteed to paralyse producers with fear, ‘music theory’ is it… and no wonder: most learning material is textbook-dull, full of jargon, and simply not designed for computer musicians. We’ve long recognised such problems here at , with our ever-popular Easy Guide series packing in over 150 tutorials to date. But what if you need a onestop primer to get you up to speed? You need it easy, you need it fast, and you need it right now! Well, here it is!

With this tutorial, you’ll be making amazing evocative melodies and jazzing up your chord progressions in no time. You’ll learn everything from basic major and minor scales to inversions, suspensions, seventh chords, key changes, modes, exotic scales, and loads more. We’ll show you which notes go where, with audio examples, MIDI files, and videos packed with clear annotations and extra explanation. All with zero music notation in sight, and a minimum of jargon.

As if that’s not enough, we bring you the CM MIDI Construction Kit, comprising almost 2000 ready-made scales and chords in every key. These include our scale ‘templates’ that show you which notes to use, making composition a breeze!