Community Challenge | 74
Community Challenge | 74

Write a Melody with Harmony

If you have a difficult time writing melodies and harmonies, here are some lessons that will be helpful:
Melody Making
Writing Harmonies 

Your personal skill level, comfort zone, and free time are all important considerations when approaching a Community Challenge - I’m not asking anyone to write a full song! I’m asking for whatever you have the time, mental bandwidth, and skill to accomplish in roughly two weeks.

If you end up writing ANYTHING, I consider that a huge success. Write SOMETHING. It could be just a simple chord progression you put together or a riff you came up with using a pentatonic scale. Use the writing prompt to guide you and watch my video if you need more ideas.

POST WHAT YOU’VE WRITTEN HERE ON THE COMMUNITY FORUM.

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Community ChallengesScott JohnsonCommunity Challenges 61-90
Live Lesson | 17
Live Lesson | 17

How To Navigate My Patreon (and have more fun learning)

In this stream I talked about how I want you to be a rebel and a "bad student."

I'm not grading your homework, I'm just trying to help you understand music theory and how it applies to guitar and to actually making music!

In this lesson I give you permission to skip ahead and learn about the broader context of music theory so that when you go back to the previous lessons they will actually make more sense. Do things out of order - search for the fun stuff to learn, then go back and learn the basics with more understanding.

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Live LessonScott JohnsonLive Lesson 1-30
Community Challenge | 73
Community Challenge | 73

Write Something with a Guitar Solo

Your personal skill level, comfort zone, and free time are all important considerations when approaching a Community Challenge - I’m not asking anyone to write a full song! I’m asking for whatever you have the time, mental bandwidth, and skill to accomplish in roughly two weeks.

If you end up writing ANYTHING, I consider that a huge success. Write SOMETHING. It could be just a simple chord progression you put together or a riff you came up with using a pentatonic scale. Use the writing prompt to guide you and watch my video if you need more ideas.

POST WHAT YOU’VE WRITTEN HERE ON THE COMMUNITY FORUM.

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Community ChallengesScott JohnsonCommunity Challenges 61-90
Live Lesson | 16
Live Lesson | 16

CAGED Soloing General Concepts

In this lesson we discussed general concepts around CAGED Soloing with the following concepts:

• Why the pentatonic scale is the best starting point (referring to modes, etc)
• How soloing over chord tones works
• How CAGED System makes the Chords in a Key transposable
• How chord progressions are absolutely fundamental to soloing over chord tones

Join me for a live lesson every Tuesday at 4PM from now on! If you can’t make it, that’s ok! You can always watch later. If you click the “YouTube” logo on the video, you’ll be able to watch the livestream on YouTube and that’s where you’ll have access to the live chat. Feel free to ask questions in the comments below or in the live chat, but keep in mind I’ll typically save all the questions for the end of the lesson.

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Live LessonScott JohnsonLive Lesson 1-30
Community Challenge | 72
Community Challenge | 72

Write Something Simple

I figured this would be a good place to start for the New Year.

Your personal skill level, comfort zone, and free time are all important considerations when approaching a Community Challenge - I’m not asking anyone to write a full song! I’m asking for whatever you have the time, mental bandwidth, and skill to accomplish in roughly two weeks.

If you end up writing ANYTHING, I consider that a huge success. Write SOMETHING. It could be just a simple chord progression you put together or a riff you came up with using a pentatonic scale. Use the writing prompt to guide you and watch my video if you need more ideas.

POST WHAT YOU’VE WRITTEN HERE ON THE COMMUNITY FORUM.

Read More
Community ChallengesScott JohnsonCommunity Challenges 61-90
Live Lesson | 14
Live Lesson | 14

What Counts as a Scale in my Melody Making Rules?

In this stream, I got to show you a weird test graphic I made. I didn't end up using it for the lesson I made it for, but I still thought it was cool!

The graphic was showing how I think about scales when it comes to writing melodies. If you've seen my Melody Making Course, you know my basic melody writing guidelines:


1. Always start on a chord tone
2. If you skip notes, only skip from a chord tone TO another chord tone
3. If moving through the scale, keep going until you get to another chord tone

The trick with this third rule is that you can use the chromatic scale, the full scale, or the pentatonic scale whenever you feel like it, as long as you follow a couple guidelines I talk about in this video. I also attached a little graph below for a nice visual representation.

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Live Stream ArchiveScott Johnsonlive streams 121-150