Music Fundamentals: Explore & Create Your Unique Sound

Jacob Collier's class is less a music theory course than a philosophy of listening, delivered by a musician demonstrating his own internal process in real time at the piano. Over nine short lessons, he moves through the raw materials of a song, melody, harmony, rhythm, and lyrics, using one improvised tune as a running example that gets rebuilt and reharmonized at every stage.

What it actually teaches

The strongest stretch is the middle section on harmony. Collier explains the circle of fifths by drawing it live, then shows how moving clockwise "brightens" a chord progression and counterclockwise "darkens" it, using his own F major melody as the test case. He harmonizes the same four bars multiple times, first with plain triads, then with passing chords, then with a full chromatic reharmonization where nearly every note gets its own chord. Watching one melody survive that many transformations is genuinely instructive: it shows that a chord progression is a choice, not a rule, in a way that abstract theory explanations rarely manage.

The rhythm lesson is thinner but has one useful idea: subdividing a single beat into groups of three, four, or five to change its character without changing the tempo. The lyrics lesson is the weakest of the set. Collier's method amounts to naming an image (a summer evening), free-associating related words (gold, circles, home), and slotting them into the existing melodic rhythm. It is a legitimate way to get unstuck, but it is closer to a stream-of-consciousness demonstration than a technique a viewer could reliably repeat alone.

Where it falls short

The course's biggest limitation is that it never resolves. The final lesson hands the unfinished song back to the student with an explicit instruction to write the rest themselves, framed as an assignment for the class project gallery. That is a defensible creative choice for an open-ended composition prompt, but it means nobody leaves with a complete piece of music or a repeatable songwriting checklist. The class teaches a sensibility more than a skill set.

It also assumes real musical fluency that a beginner will not have. Terms like triad inversions, dominant seventh extensions, and the relative minor arrive quickly and are explained just once, aimed squarely at someone who already knows a fair amount of theory and simply wants to see it used more expressively. Skillshare's blurb hedges by saying beginners can "draw inspiration," but there is little here that a true novice could apply directly.

What the class offers instead is a working demonstration of one virtuoso's creative process: how he listens for what he likes, how he treats every musical parameter (loud/quiet, dense/sparse, organized/chaotic) as an adjustable dial, and how he moves fluidly between melody, harmony, and rhythm without ever treating them as separate problems. For an intermediate musician stuck in rigid habits, that model of constant experimentation is the real value, even if the course leaves the actual songwriting homework undone.

What you will learn

• ·How to name and manipulate the basic 'axes of sound' (high/low, dense/sparse, organized/chaotic, foreground/background) as a vocabulary for musical decisions
• ·How melodic intervals (seconds through octaves) function, recognized through famous tunes like 'Amazing Grace' and 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'
• ·How to build triads from the circle of fifths and use neighboring keys to color a harmony
• ·How to harmonize a melody using passing chords, secondary dominants, and chord inversions
• ·How to layer in-time and out-of-time rhythmic elements against a steady pulse
• ·A method for generating lyrics by free-associating images and feelings, then fitting them to an existing melodic phrase