“It is assumed that, if you can write for orchestra, you can write for anything.” An agent once told me that, and I took it to heart so much that I wrote two courses to help you get where you need to be with orchestration. Here is an excerpt.

Learn various music composition techniques and resources that will help you get started as you write your own piece of music.

Michael Sweet shares eight techniques that can be used to score interactive music for video games.

Music arranger Jerry Gates explains how to create music arrangements for linear, circular, and square melodic shapes in this excerpt from his course “Arranging: Woodwinds and Strings.”

The modes have provided fertile musical soil for jazz composers since the late 1950s. In effect, modes can be viewed as displacements of the major scale.

Jerry Gates’s work as an arranger, orchestrator, composer, and producer have been featured worldwide, on the concert stage and for TV shows and commercials.

Jonathan Feist explains the concept of imaginary barlines in music theory, a notation convention designed to help the music reader know what’s syncopated.

Guitarists might read three different types of notation. Each has its strengths.