Build your dream composer portfolio → https://www.skool.com/composer/about
In the Composer Training Studio, you train like a working composer. Professional-style briefs mean you always know what to write next, and a repeatable, professional-level workflow means you finish what you start. You learn the techniques of great composers and then actually use them, and you follow our blueprint to find and develop your own sound.
With feedback, support and momentum along the way, you build a real composing practice and the portfolio you've always wanted.
Your first week is free: finish a Hollywood-style cue, side by side with me, and design your personal portfolio plan → https://www.skool.com/composer/about
How do you write music that sounds like the composers you love? I show you the method Nadia Boulanger gave her students, as David Conte told it to me, and how memorising two John Williams cues from Harry Potter taught me more about Hollywood orchestration than any textbook. Then you'll see why it works (chunking, prediction and your own mental library, with chess masters, Mozart, Charlie Parker and Hans Zimmer along the way), so you can absorb any style you love and find your own sound.
Chapters
0:00 How to learn any style: Nadia Boulanger's method
0:48 Stuck and sounding the same: Boulanger's three steps
1:41 What memorising John Williams did to my orchestration
2:54 Why it works: learning music from the inside
3:18 1. Chunking: what chess masters really remember
5:02 2. Prediction: start hearing what comes next
6:27 3. Your mental library: how Charlie Parker learned to improvise
8:08 Never avoid the obvious: informed intuition
8:34 Will this make me a copycat?
9:18 Finding your own voice (Hans Zimmer)
10:32 Absorb the greats with me in the Studio
Music
All the music in this video is my own work: my compositions, my productions for other artists, and my own playing.
Studies in the video
Chase & Simon (1973), Perception in chess, Cognitive Psychology 4(1)
Koelsch, Gunter, Friederici & Schröger (2000), Brain indices of music processing: "Nonmusicians" are musical, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12(3)
Erman & Warren (2000), The idiom principle and the open choice principle, Text 20(1)
Thomas Owens (1974), Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation (PhD dissertation, UCLA)
Photo credits (Wikimedia Commons; cropped or cut out)
John Williams: Lindseysharpe, CC BY-SA 4.0
Hans Zimmer: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0
Hans Zimmer (thumbnail): ColliderVideo, CC BY 3.0
Washington National Cathedral: APK, CC BY 4.0
French horn: BenP, CC BY 2.5
Electric guitars: Auge=mit, CC BY-SA 4.0
Microphone: Lucasbosch, CC BY-SA 3.0