Want to understand Japanese music? Want to create Japanese-inspired songs?
Introducing The Complete Japanese Music Theory Course! The first and only of it’s kind to date!
Hi! I’m Nostalgia. I’m so excited to announce the launch of this course, because I’ve been a fan of Japanese music for a very long time! I first came across it when I was 12 and I fell in love. I’m almost 30 now, so I’ve been listening to Japanese music for more than half my life!
I love the instrumentation, the passion in the singer’s voice, the positive and encouraging messages, the storytelling chord progressions, the funky basslines, and just how unpredictable it is. It’s hard to even compare songs because they are so different from each other. There’s songs I’ve been listening to for 10+ years and I have yet to get tired of them!
Being an anime fan for this long, it was certainly a lonely path in the beginning. There were quite a few anime fans, so some songs were quite popular among us, but otherwise, no one really cared to dig deeper into the genre, or even remember the names of the artists who made those songs. Regardless, I was a proud Jmusic fan. Below is a clip of me playing “Every Heart” by Boa from Inuyasha for my school’s multicultural assembly while I was in Grade 11.
I always loved music class and played a variety of other instruments, including keyboard, viola, clarinet, and bass drum in my school’s drumline. While I was confident learning songs and playing instruments, my schools only taught me to read music, so I never understood theory deep enough to create and improvise. I definitely felt like I was in a box and thought those who could create freely had some innate musical talent.
When I later picked up guitar, I said I wasn’t going to be in that box anymore. It was quite easy to see patterns since the fretboard makes all notes equal (as opposed to piano where sharps and flats are separated) and that made it easy to understand theory on a deeper level. After understanding the basics, I was so excited to learn how to play and create Japanese music…but I couldn’t.
I followed the rules, ya know…start on I, utilize IV and V, ignore the vii° (diminished) chord….but it felt like anything I could string together just sounded…Western. It sounded basic and predictable. It didn’t have that Japanese flare and wonder that I loved. I would try to breakdown the Japanese songs I liked to learn from them, but it wasn’t making sense!
I couldn’t even figure out what Key songs were in! Youtube videos be like “Just put the 3 major chords in their slot, there’s only one way they would fit. If there’s a diminished chord, you know the chord above it is the key!” But when I check out the chord charts of my fav songs, some have over 7 major chords, 5 minor chords, and 3 diminished chords.
AND “Cry Baby” from Tokyo Revengers
When I would ask other guitarists about it, they would just tell to ‘relax and have fun’, or they assumed I was being biased when I said ‘Japanese music was different’. I was actually starting to lose hope and enthusiasm. If I couldn’t play what I wanted, then I didn’t really want to play guitar! What’s the point!?
Thankfully, I came across this video by Marty Friedman that at least confirmed my suspicions that Western and Japanese music was truly different. That at least gave me the confidence boost I needed to keep searching.
The resources out there were still nil though. More recently, thanks to the increased popularity of anime over the pandemic and a few trending songs on social media, a handful of Youtubers have covered the topic of Japanese music, but sadly, they only covered the stereotypical anime progression, or they went into Ghibli Studio territory which wasn’t what I was personally looking for
I spent many months looking, searching, and just trying to find any clues that could help me figured out why Japanese music sounded the way it does. Slowly, but surely, after using my early intermediate Japanese to dig on that side of the internet, I started to figure things out. With each theory concept, the puzzle pieces were coming together, and chord progressions were making sense.
Earlier in the pandemic, I started a couple blogs in personal development and goal achievement niche, but I ran out of article ideas after about 20 posts. I didn’t see a future in them so I have since shut them down. I initially started this website for my rookie anime cover band and I was eager to blog as I knew that would help promote us.
With each new article, I realized I had quite a bit of knowledge on Japanese music, and an intense passion to do research on things I still didn’t know. When I came across a new musical concept that Japanese artists regularly utilized, I was so excited to write about it. Japanese music was MY niche!
I was just so eager to fill the gaps for Japanese music on search engines because I still remember how long and hard I searched for answers, but I constantly met dead ends. For logical learners like myself, it’s super frustrating to not understand something and to not be able to find the answers anywhere. I wanted to relieve others of that pain, and also prevent others from getting discouraged.
After 15 months of serious blogging and over 200 articles on guitar, bands, music theory, and Japanese chord progressions, I would say I’m pretty much authorized to create a course on this topic. It was actually something I wanted to do early on, but my guitar skills were still lacking and I didn’t have a decent recording software anyways.
For Christmas 2022, I was gifted FL Studio with the purpose of recording guitar, but I saw it as a world of new opportunities. After a couple weeks of learning to navigate and also creating my first Japanese inspired song, “Be Courageous”. After that, I realized…I could use this software for those clips as well! With nothing else really in the way of creating the course, I got to it!
This course pretty much goes over all the music theory basics one needs to even start to comprehend Japanese music, and then we go into more advance musical theory concepts, followed by 50 chord progressions that I’ve compiled, quizzes, assignments, and just everything I’ve discovered through my years of research.
So if you’re a musician or producer who loves Japanese music and wants to create something similar, or maybe you’re a music teacher who has anime loving students and you’re not sure what the hype is, this course would have everything you could ever need in one place.
It is brand new, so for the rest of January and February, as I’m making some edits and getting feedback, you can get this course for half off! Buy it soon, cause that deal won’t last forever 😛
Click here to learn more about The Complete Japanese Music Theory Course and it’s contents!
Sincerely, Nostalgia~