Throughout this course you'll find lessons like this one. They're different from the theory lessons because they're less about learning and more about doing. You're going to make something.

After all, the whole point of learning music is so you can make music, right?

Each Workshop gives you a set of rules and a creative prompt. The rules are strict on purpose. You might look at them and think "that's barely anything to work with". That's the point. They're called Creative Constraints. In the beginning it's about helping you to get started before you've learned everything you might think you need... but even once you have filled your toolbox to the brim, you'll likely find that setting some creative constraints are a very helpful tool.

There are no wrong answers here, as long as you follow the rules. Your melody will sound different from everyone else's, and that's great! What matters is that you're getting practice, you're having fun, and you're learning to express yourself!

You need some way to write notes down and hear them back. Any of these will work:

• Pen and staff paper. This is our strong recommendation for now. Print some off (just google 'printable staff paper'), buy a staff notebook off of amazon or just grab a ruler and draw five lines. If you have an instrument handy try to play what you've written down.
• Music Notation Software This is overkill in the beginning, but will be very useful later on. You probably don't want to add the overhead of a software learning curve just yet. However, the big win with software is that you can click on the staff to add notes and then immediately play back what you've written. More information about software coming in the next section.
• A DAW. If you already make music in a DAW you can drop notes into a piano roll. If this is you, your main goal is probably always to go back to the piano roll, so it won't hurt to start now. Start by sketching your music on a piece of paper, but feel free to put that in your DAW. Try to restrain yourself though. Pick a relatively clean instrument sound and don't add a ton of effects, or sick beats. Focus on the assignment.

Notation Software

As mentioned above, we think you should start out with pen and paper for the first couple workshops, but we know some of you are going to ignore us and go for the software anyway. There are several options for you here, but we have a couple of recommendations for you.

The industry standards software for music notation are Dorico and Sibelius. They're both legitimately great, but they're incredibly expensive, and not particularly beginner friendly.

NoteFlight and Flat.io are free online apps. The free versions are relatively basic, but will definitely be enough to get you going and take you through the curriculum. They have premium versions with more options like creating more scores with more instruments, but that won't be needed in the beginning.

MuseScore. It's free and just as capable as the expensive industry-standard programs you'll find out there. The full unlimited version of MuseScore is free, though their website is a little misleading. Their website has a lot of things you can buy, and little items you can subscribe to, but the software itself is free.

Our recommendation for now is to try out the free online apps for now, and once you get to the point of considering purchasing a subscription to them (i.e. when you've run out of free scores) check out MuseScore.

The Exercises

OK, with all of that out of the way... let's actually write some music!

Here are your notes:

Three notes. Three white keys. That's all you get.

The rules:

1. Use only D, E and A. No other notes. You may use these notes in any octave.
2. Write a melody that is 8 to 16 notes long.
3. Start on D. End on D.
4. Don't worry about rhythm. Play every note for roughly the same length. Feel free to add pauses at the end of phrases.
5. Sing or play your melody when you're done. If you can't sing it back from memory after a couple tries, simplify it.

A few things to think about:

You don't have to use all three notes all the time. A stretch of just D and E, or E and A, is perfectly fine. In fact, leaving a note out for a while and then bringing it back is one of the most effective things you can do with a set this small.

Try repeating a short pattern somewhere in your melody. Two or three notes that come back later, maybe in a slightly different spot. Notice what that does. It gives the ear something to grab onto.

Don't rush through this. Three notes is not a lot, but that's exactly why every decision matters. The distance between D and E feels different from the distance between E and A. Listen to that difference and use it

Write your melody down, play it a few times, and move on to Exercise 2 when you're happy with it. "Happy with it" doesn't mean "think it's a masterpiece." It means you've made deliberate choices and you can hear why you made them.

New notes:

Same idea, more notes.

The rules are the same as Exercise 1, but with these notes:

1. Use only these notes, in any octave.
2. 8 to 16 notes.
3. Start on F. End on F.
4. Same length for every note.
5. Sing or play it back.

Even moreso than in the last one, try leaving out one or more of the notes for some section of your composition. Give the listener some variety!

Try this one a couple times, but pick a different note and treat it as 'home base' and use THAT note as the starting and ending note. Pay attention to how centering different notes makes the same pitch set feel different.

Choose any three notes from the twelve you know. They don't have to be white keys. They don't have to be next to each other. C, F#, and Bb? Sure. D, Eb, and A? Go for it.

Same rules:

1. Only your three chosen notes, any octave.
2. 8 to 16 notes.
3. Start and end on whichever note you've decided is "home."
4. Same note length throughout.
5. Sing or play it back.

Before you write, play your three notes a few times and listen to the intervals between them. How wide are the gaps? Are two of them close together with the third farther away? Are they evenly spaced? The answer will shape what your melody wants to do.

If you picked three notes that are all half steps apart (like C, C#, D), you'll find the melody has a tense, clustered quality. If you picked notes far apart (like C, F#, B), you'll get something with big leaps and a lot of air in it.

You wrote three melodies. With almost nothing. You made choices about which note comes next, when to repeat, when to change direction, when to leave a note out and bring it back. Those are compositional decisions. Real ones. The same kinds of decisions you'd make with all twelve notes available, just on a much smaller playing field.

In future Workshops, we'll gradually add more: more notes, then rhythm, then scales, then chords. Every time, the constraints will be specific and the prompts will be concrete. The creative space gets larger as you learn more theory, but the approach stays the same. Rules. Limits. Make something.

Keep your melodies. Write a date at the top of the page. This is a momentous occasion... seriously. Celebrate what you've done here.