Melodic Muse

Whether you're composing or improvising, the ability to create a compelling melody is always the key to making your music distinctive, emotional, and memorable. You do that by tapping into your ‘melodic muse’ — a craft that every musician needs to develop and continuously be fine-tuning.

Andy Timmons’ Melodic Muse presents a simple, step-by-step approach for creating melodic lines by fusing what you already know about guitar with your ear’s creative instincts. No tedious theory or boring exercises to struggle through — you will play your way through Andy’s ear-opening curriculum to ignite your own ‘melodic muse.’

”When we talk about playing melodically on the guitar, we're usually thinking of improvising, but this also applies to songwriting. It's really the same "muse" or driving force that helps us create melodies whether we’re improvising or trying to write a tune. I’ve designed this course to help you discover, feed, and nourish your ‘melodic muse’ by bridging the intellectual with what I call the ‘auralectual’ — a term I created to describe the creative direction that your ear leads you towards.”

Melodic Muse is organized the course into 3 sections. In the first section, Andy presents a melody primer describing all of he elements that comprise melodic playing and composing. Andy will also explain how the ‘auralectual’ connects with the intellectual within your own melodic muse.

”In this course, we’ll approach everything we work on using both our intellect and our auralect. We’ll analyze chord progressions and identify the scale and note choices that we might use with those chords — that’s the intellect at work. The "auralect" side of things has to deal with learning through our ears and eyes. Music is an "aural" experience. It's meant to be taken in through those mediums primarily, so we feel it most through these ways. The ear develops instincts based on everything you've taken in. I consider it like a library of ideas collected throughout our lives.

When we're improvising or composing, we're drawing on these experiences as the benchmark of what we'd like to hear. We're really trying to connect these two things — the "auralect" and intellect. And more so, we're applying the intellectual side after the fact, trying to describe the things that we feel first.”

In the second section, Andy guides you through a series of Melody Studies and Key Concepts, each featuring an explanation, a demonstration and then a playalong where you apply the concept in a musical context. You’ll learn and play through 10 studies: One Finger, One String, Play One Note Per Chord, Play Two Notes Per Chord, Target the 3rd of Each Chord, Visualize Simple Triads, Find Melodies in Triads, Train Your Ear, Call & Response Statements, Phrase It Like You Sing It, and Motivic Repetition.

The third section features 2 bonus studies and performances demonstrating Andy’s Melodic Muse principles at work. ”In the final section, we're going to take all these ideas that we've been working on and apply them to a couple of extra tracks. I'm going to take a spin through them but play on them yourself and practice working on these concepts. We’ll work with a progression taken from one of my tracks called All is Forgiven and then we’ll play over a ballad in D minor based around another one of my songs, Cry for You.”

Whatever style of music you play, at whatever level, from beginner to advanced — this is a must-have course of study that you will reference and work with across your entire guitar-playing lifetime.

All of the performance studies are tabbed and notated, plus you’ll have the backing tracks to work with on your own. You can loop and slow down the videos to work with the any of the lessons at your own pace.

Grab your guitar and lets light up your melodic muse with Andy Timmons!