J. Anthony Allen – Music Theory for Electronic Music COMPLETE: Parts 1, 2, & 3 (Download)
Electronic music producers face a common frustration: tracks that sound technically proficient but lack that professional harmonic depth. You layer sounds, tweak parameters, and follow tutorials, yet something essential is missing. That missing element is usually music theory—the understanding of how melodies, chords, and basslines interact to create compelling, emotionally resonant music.
About the Course and Dr. J. Anthony Allen
Dr. J. Anthony Allen brings his Grammy Foundation-recognized teaching approach to electronic music production in this IAOMEI 5-Star Certified course. Combining all three parts of his Music Theory for Electronic Musicians series, this comprehensive program delivers music theory education specifically tailored for DAW-based production.
Dr. Allen maintains a 100% question response rate, answering every student inquiry within 24 hours, ensuring you never get stuck during your learning journey.
What This Course Covers
This complete edition teaches music theory through the lens of electronic music production, using the piano roll editor and DAW workflow rather than traditional notation-heavy methods.
Foundation: Keys, Intervals, and Triads
You’ll start by understanding the piano roll editor, octaves and their use in basslines, finding notes on the keyboard, the perfect fifth interval and its role in harmony, and what it means to be “in key.”
Building on this foundation, you’ll learn moveable patterns for any key, major and minor thirds, constructing triads (basic chords), and creating effective chord progressions.
Diatonic Harmony and Chord Progressions
Master the concept of diatonic harmony—chords that naturally belong together in a key. You’ll discover how to find all chords in any key, use Roman numeral analysis for understanding progressions, apply inversions to create smoother voice leading, and analyze professional tracks to see theory in action.
The course includes detailed analysis of tracks by Avicii (“Shame On Me”), Deadmau5 (“Ghosts N Stuff”), Daft Punk (“Get Lucky”), and Aphex Twin (“Windowlicker”), showing exactly how theory translates to hit productions.
Extended and Advanced Harmony
7th Chords: Learn the four types of 7th chords (Major 7, Minor 7, Dominant 7, Half-Diminished), understand their emotional qualities and applications, and use them in blues and electronic contexts.
Extended Chords: Explore 9th and 13th chords for richer harmonic textures, and suspended chords for tension and resolution.
Other Intervals: Master the fourth, second, and sixth intervals to expand your melodic and harmonic vocabulary.
Minor Keys and Relative Relationships
Dive into minor scale construction, relative key relationships between major and minor, minor diatonic chord progressions, and the unique cases of harmonic and melodic minor scales.
Understanding minor keys unlocks darker, more emotional production possibilities essential for many electronic genres.
You may also be interested in these courses:
- FL Studio Complete Course – Music Production for Mac & PC (Download)
- Ultimate Beginner Guitar Masterclass (2026 Update) Download
Melody and Bassline Writing
Learn systematic approaches to writing melodies that complement chord progressions, creating chord progressions that support existing melodies, and constructing compelling basslines that anchor your tracks harmonically.
Modes and Exotic Scales
Modes: Understand how the seven modes work (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian), discover the unique character of each mode, and produce tracks using modal harmony.
Advanced Concepts: Explore pentatonic scales for accessible melodies, chromatic mediants for surprising harmonic shifts, 19 exotic scales with included MIDI files, and techniques for changing keys within tracks.
Production Integration
What distinguishes this course is its production-focused approach. Dr. Allen creates nine complete tracks throughout the course, each demonstrating different theoretical concepts in real production contexts. After each project, you receive the full session files to examine, modify, and even release as your own work.
The course works with any DAW—while demonstrations use Ableton Live 9, the concepts apply universally to FL Studio, Logic Pro, Bitwig, or any other production software.
Who Should Enroll
This course suits producers finding their tracks lack harmonic depth, beginners wanting to understand how music works from day one, intermediate producers discovering gaps in their knowledge, and anyone wanting to move beyond trial-and-error composition.
No music reading experience required—everything is taught through the piano roll editor and practical production examples.
