A song is a machine for setting up a listener's guess, then deciding what to do about it. Learn to build that machine on purpose: 20 techniques, every diagram plays, every idea comes with a dial you can turn.
The pop lean and the tresillo both score 0.33 on syncopation. Play them. The tresillo leaves beats 2 and 3 empty, and that silence is where all its power comes from.
Click any cell to build your own pattern. Or open the free syncopation calculator.
The brain can't stop guessing what comes next. Pleasure in music is largely the feeling of that guessing working: confirmed, or wrong in an interesting way. The build and the payoff are chemically separate events, so a great chorus can't rescue a badly built approach.
Perception encodes change, not level. There's no such thing as an energetic chorus, only a chorus more energetic than what came before it. A quiet bridge makes the last chorus. Nothing is loud on its own.
Every technique in this course is a precise way to operate one of those two engines. If a technique isn't doing one of them, it isn't doing anything.
Plus the Control Panel (every dial on one page, with the range that works) and the Revision Checklist (23 questions to run on a finished draft, each pointing to the module that fixes it).
One module, one drill, every day. Tick days off as you go. Day 14: one finished song, checked against the list before anyone hears it.
Pat Pattison's object writing, prosody and stability: the best-documented system for words.
David Huron, Sweet Anticipation, and research on dopamine, uncertainty and surprise in music.
Godfried Toussaint's rhythm geometry, and groove studies on how syncopation makes people move.
Where a term is coaching vocabulary rather than settled science, the course says so.
One payment. It opens in your browser the moment you've paid, with every diagram playable, and stays yours for life.
No. Everything uses a 16-step grid you can count out loud: 1 e & a, 2 e & a… If you can clap a rhythm, you can use this.
Anything with a pulse and words: pop, rap, R&B, rock, indie, singer-songwriter, worship, musical theatre.
These are revision tools, not rules. Write badly and fast, then measure. The songs you love broke most of these rules; the point is to know what you're breaking and do it on purpose.
14 days at 20 minutes a day. After that it's a reference you keep open while you revise.
Checkout sends you straight to the course. Bookmark that page: it's your lifetime access. The PDF download is inside. Lost the link? Email info@gridandguess.com.
Email info@gridandguess.com within 14 days and you get a full refund.