When students ask me about learning to write music, I tend to start with the same advice, so I thought I'd collect that advice into a short video in case it helps you along your songwriting journey!

If you’ve been playing piano for a while and would like to branch out into writing music, here are a few tips I've learned over the years to help you enjoy the process and bring your best ideas forward.

After seeing how popular my post on choosing chord progressions that reflect your emotions was, I wanted to offer another way of approaching heartfelt songwriting — that is, starting with a melody first and choosing your chord progressions afterwards. In this video, I demonstrate my process for infusing my emotions into a melody and then choosing a chord progression that feels right for it.

Recently we’ve been talking about the chords within any major key signature and how you can use them to create chord progressions that express different feelings. Today I’d like to expand on this to talk about some of the variations to the standard chords that musicians often use to express even more emotions in their music.

Once you know the basics of where the major and minor chords are in a key signature, you’re ready to start experimenting at your piano and finding sequences or chord progressions that you like. But it can be difficult to get started at first because the possibilities for your music seem so endless. How do you know which chords to use and which ones will work best for your song?

If you want to start writing music, one of the first decisions you’ll need to make is which chord progressions you want to have as the foundation of your song. There are a couple of ways you can get started in this.

Today I’d like to start a series of videos teaching music theory specifically for people who are interested in writing their own music. Because music theory can be intimidating for people, it seems like a good place to start would be to just talk about what music theory is and why it’s important to learn about.