My Berklee Music Online Experience
July 1, 2011 - Today marks the end of Week 1 of the online Jazz Composition course I'm taking through Berklee College of Music. I'm taking the course to learn how to teach music online. What better way to learn how to teach a course than to take a course first, right? I'll be posting my assignments here mainly to keep me honest. Posting publicly like this will force me to stay on track and to try to keep the quality up while I try to balance family, rest, and other creative ventures. For those that don't know me (bio), I teach music so I am on summer vacation, but for me, there is never a vacation. I'm probably a workaholic. I hope you enjoy my posts.
Assignment for Week 1: Write a Riff Based Blues using the 12 bar blues. - 7/1/11
"First Stop" Lead Sheet
My assignment for Week 1. I played with shifting the rhythm of my phrase...
m. 1 - F G C# D, etc. starts on beat 4.
m. 3 - the same sequence of notes begins on beat 1.

--darin
Assignment for Week 2: Blues with Alternate Turnaround (and substitutions) - 7/8/11
"Blues for Franklin" Lead Sheet
Here's my assignment for week 2. Blues using substitution.

2 bar intro -- 12 bar blues begins on m. 3
mm. 4 and 6 - tritone substitution
Alternate turnaround (m. 11) - Em7(b5) A7 | Dm6 G7 |
-- iiø7/ii V7/ii | ii V7 (note: Dm6 a/k/a G7/D)
m. 7 - modal interchange (Fm instead of F)
m. 8 - secondary dominant (V7/V) - G7 on beat 3

Last 4 bars repeated as coda.

--darin
Assignment for Week 3: Blues with Alternate Turnaround (and substitutions) - 7/14/11
Here's my reworked version of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" by Lennon/McCartney. The assignment said to add 9ths to the original chords. Listen using headphones since the bass probably won't show up on most laptop speakers.
"Wanna Hold Your Hand" Lead Sheet
This next assignment was to basically write an 8 bar progression but to have two versions of it. The first would be open-ended and lead into a repeat (think 1st ending) and the second would be closed and ending on the I chord.
8 Bar Chord Progression (actually, it's 16)
Assignment for Week 4: Blues with Alternate Turnaround (and substitutions) - 7/28/11
No, I wasn't a flake in Week 4. Just nothing significant to post. I did a written analysis of Yardbird Suite, an exercise on pivot chords, and wrote chords for a B section to the A section chord progression in Week 3.
Click here to go to Weeks 5 - 8