Modules
Theory
Beginner
- Lesson
What Music Is Made Of: Melody, Rhythm and Harmony
The three things every piece of music does at once — one note after another, when those notes happen, and what sounds together — and which part of this course teaches each one.
- Lesson
How Sound Is Made: Pitch, Loudness and Timbre
What a sound physically is, why a faster vibration is a higher note, why loudness and pitch are independent of each other, and why the same note is unmistakably a guitar and not a piano.
- Lesson
The Harmonic Series: Why One String Sounds Like Many
Why a single vibrating string produces a whole stack of notes at once, which notes are in that stack and in what order, and why the intervals at the bottom of it are the ones that sound consonant.
- Lesson
Notes and Semitones
The 12 notes of Western music, the semitone steps that separate them, and how to find any note on the keyboard.
- Lesson
Intervals: the Building Blocks
What an interval is, the semitone distances that give each one its name, and why the third is the interval that matters most for chords.
- Lesson
Interval Quality: Perfect, Major, Minor, Diminished, Augmented
Why some intervals come in major and minor and others do not, what diminished and augmented mean, and the one distance the last lesson's table skipped.
- Lesson
Interval Direction and Size: Up, Down, Together, and Past the Octave
The same interval arrives three different ways — ascending, descending, or sounded together — and keeps going past the octave under a second set of names.
- Lesson
Scales: One Pattern, Twelve Keys
What a scale is, the tone-and-semitone formula that builds a major scale from any note, why the natural minor is that same collection with a different home, and why the keyboard's black keys sit exactly where the formula needs them.
- Lesson
The Harmonic Field: the Chords a Scale Contains
Stack thirds on each degree of a major scale and seven chords come out in a fixed order — major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished. What the roman numerals mean, and why the seventh degree is the odd one.
- Lesson
The Circle of Fifths: Why G Major Has One Sharp
Why stacking fifths from C adds one sharp per key, why the order of sharps never changes, how to read a key signature at a glance, and why the circle closes after twelve steps.
Intermediate
- Lesson
Enharmonic Intervals: When the Same Sound Is Two Different Intervals
Counting semitones names an interval's quality but not its number — which comes from the letters, and is why two identical-sounding distances can be different intervals.