Diploma Program Modules & Elective Courses


Diploma Program Modules:

Performance Module Performance & Improvisation (P&I) (View the module course listing.)

4 microsemesters: In the USSCM Performance & Improvisation Program, you will acquire a firm foundation in such essential areas of music as:
  • Eartraining, the skill to know and musically name what it is you are hearing.
  • Harmony, the skill to recognize the harmonic sequences and practices associated with historical musical styles.
  • Notation, the art of clearly writing music which will be played by yourself and others.
  • Arranging, the art and skill of creating modern charts for performance by small groups or as overdubs.
  • Instrumental Technique, the art of rapidly acquiring skill on your primary and secondary instruments.
  • Improvisation, the art of real-time composition on your primary and secondary instruments.
  • Ensemble Training, the essential experience of playing with other great professional musicians through the exclusive USSCM Faculty Minus One(tm) process.
  • Repertory, the experience of exposure to and immersion in a wide variety of commercial musical styles. (design your program now)


Continue your program by choosing up to six other professional areas:

The core categories of study in each of the subsequent Programs remain the same (Eartraining, Harmony, etc.), but with increasing sophistication; to these are added the relevant module materials for a well-rounded program.
Concentrations

All Concentrations require the Performance Module.
Schillinger System of Musical Composition (SSMC)
4 microsemesters: The world-famous Schillinger System is the advanced tool for music analysis and generation that has been used very successfully by such songwriters as George Gershwin, such improvisors as Howard Roberts and a great many Hollywood film composers; for example, it was the Schillinger System that Gershwin used to compose "I Got Rhythm," and which HR used to develop the vocabulary needed for his well-known solos.
  • USSCM has modernized the Schillinger System for today's composers and improvisors who wish to have a special professional edge in their understanding of melodic and rhythmic development (which is perhaps the most important shaping force in music). In the SSMC Program, USSCM brings Schillinger up to date; we also cover and compare such esoteric systems as JS Bach's System of Chordscales, the George Russell Lydian Chromatic Concept, Bill Leavitt's Melodic Chordscale System, Charlie Parker's System of Jazz Improvisation, and several other useful approaches. To elect SSMC, you should have a working fluency with the subjects covered in MSLC and be prepared to rapidly realize your work and record it as MP3 audio files. (design your program now)
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Concentrations

Any concentration which requires Arranging / Orchestration or Media Scoring also require SSMC. You cannot concentrate in SSMC.
Improv Advanced Improvisation
4 microsemesters: In Performance & Improvisation, we have laid the technical and stylistic groundwork which includes Standards, Duke/Miles, Classics/Ballads, Latin/Bossa. Advanced Improvisation continues, with the development of skills for further important styles: Blues, Bebop, Fusion, Modern Jazz, etc. Stylistic repertoire is continued appropriately in all the other modules. While building repertoire, we continue the subject structure outlined in Performance & Improvisation above, but the content becomes increasingly advanced, covering all sorts of improvisational approaches and theories applicable to modern commercial music (design your program now)

 

Concentrations

   
Performer-Soloist
   
Performer-Sideman
   
Songwriter-Player/Performer
Songwriting Module Melody, Songwriting & Linear Counterpoint (MSLC)
4 microsemesters: To elect MSLC, you should have a working fluency with Commercial Music Eartraining, Harmony, Notation, MP3 Recording Techniques, a substantial Performance Repertory of important Commercial Music styles, experience with Performance & Improvisation in Ensemble settings and familiarity with the fundamentals of Arranging. The foregoing are features of the USSCM P&I Program.
  • As you build upon your P&I foundation, in the MSLC Program you will acquire powerful techniques of melodic and thematic analysis with which to explore a substantial but focused library of important music. Equipped with new analytical skills and musical conditioning, you will then turn to linguistic analysis and apply it to both rapid song composition and real-time improvisation.

    Finally, as an essential component of the development of a personal style, you will explore the balance between the vertical and linear aspects of music through the creation of a wide range of projects from modern 'chorales' to contemporary 'fugues'. In the MSLC Program, not only songwriters and composers, but also guitarists and keyboardists will benefit from a full elaboration of these techniques on their primary and secondary instruments. (design your program now)

Concentrations

   
Performer-Singer/Songwriter
   
Music Business Professional
Arranging Module Arranging / Orchestration (A/O) (prerequisite: Schillinger System (S))
4 microsemesters: Students who elect A/O should have a working fluency with the concepts of the MSLC and SSMC Programs. In the USSCM A/O Program, you will acquire dexterity in your creative use of the mechanics of ensemble expression within various musical settings and production situations.
  • You will acquire the techniques of Jazz Composition, Arranging for Large Ensembles, Writing for Strings and Principles of Orchestration. Projects include writing and realizing scores of various size ensembles and studio orchestras. (design your program now)

Concentrations

   
Arranger-Producer
Media Scoring Module Media Scoring (MS) (prerequisites: Schillinger System (S) and Arranging/Orchestration (Ork))
4 microsemesters: USSCM students who elect Media Scoring will have achieved, as a prerequisite, the subjects covered in P&I, MSLC, SSMC, A/0 and, as a byproduct of their studies, a practical understanding of the recording and overdubbing process.
  • In the MS Program, you will take your skills to the next level as you learn how to synchronize musical recordings to visual media such as film, video, etc. You will accomplish projects in several important Commercial Music forms and styles, including Jingles (the art of musical merchandising), Commercials (the art of audiovisual persuasion), Trailers (coming attractions) and Filmscores (the art of enhancing the audience's emotional experience of a movie). (design your program now)
Concentrations

   
Multimedia Scoring Composer   
Media Scoring Module Music Production & Engineering (MPE)
4 microsemesters: By artfully blending the skills of the arranger, composer, performer and engineer, today's film, video and CD-ROM composers are specialists who command good salaries and have interesting work in the fastest growing area of the music business. Multimedia composers are found everywhere the visual and aural arts meet. For maximum flexibility, the MP&E module may be added to any USSCM program, or taken right after P&I.(design your program now)
Concentrations

   
Music Production Engineer

At the end of your studies, you will be awarded a USSCM Diploma citing all the Programs you have thus far accomplished.  

You may choose from two to five, 4-microsemester modules, taken in the order of your preference. The first in the sequence for all modules must be the "Performance & Improvisation" module. (This is a requirement for all diploma program students.)
You may then choose your preferred order for the Advanced Improv, Songwriting-Linear Counterpoint or Schillinger System modules.
(The Schillinger System enhances all musical skills and is prerequisite to Arranging/Orchestration, which is prerequisite to MediaScoring.)

This approach is meant to allow you to design an academic program that best suits your current skills and goals.

Diploma students must choose two electives from the list below. Discounts and scholarships are available for diploma program students only.

The first elective will between the 3rd & 4th microsemeters and second elective will be between the 7th & 8th microsemesters.

When you are ready to start, feel free to call to discuss your program design.

Now read more about the elective and certificate courses below. After move on to designing your diploma program or learn more about how you can arrange your programs around your modules to structure your discipline.

Elective Courses / Certificate Courses:

(certificate courses can be taken as electives for diploma program students)

UNIVERSALS

TRAININGS

WORKSHOPS

INTENSIVES

UNIVERSALS

 

PERFECT PITCH
10 Weeks
While some highly-advertised courses are 'snake oil', it is possible for most of us to overcome years of Relative Pitch conditioning and experience increasing levels of Absolute Pitch sensitivity, but training must be very precise to succeed. USSCM has assembled and organized all the relevent research, surveyed all the historical and currently available methods, evaluated and put it all into a fun but 'no-punches-pulled' perspective. This information has been judiciously combined with the most efficient methods and USSCM's proprietary approach for acquiring Absolute Pitch, organized as a serious regimen. For lasting results, you must be prepared to work daily for short but concentrated periods (one hour minumum)! You may not take this course at the same time as Relative Pitch Universals! Students who complete both Relative Pitch and Perfect Pitch will receive bonus instructions on how to sustain both skills. You will experience perfect pitch; growing it and maintaining it is up to you. This is an evolving course, with new information and techniques added periodically. Students who complete both Relative Pitch and Perfect Pitch will receive bonus instructions on how to sustain both skills and may retake either for half tuition. (design your program now)

RELATIVE PITCH
10 Weeks
Most of us experience Relative Pitch, but our sensitivity is often not high enough to be truly useful. Starting from the beginning and progressing rapidly, USSCM has assembled all the tradtional approaches, organized and modified them, then combined them with USSCM's proprietary approach into the most efficient professional RP training system ever devised. This is the most comprehensive approach to making our Relative Pitch skills more intense and useful and simultaneously trains many important other tonal harmonic and melodic skills. You may not take this course at the same time as Perfect Pitch Universals! This is an evolving course, with new information and techniques periodically added. Students who complete both Relative Pitch and Perfect Pitch will receive bonus instructions on how to sustain both skills and may retake either for half tuition. (design your program now)

PERSONALITY RESONANCE PRACTICUM FOR PERFORMERS, SONGWRITERS AND COMPOSERS
10 Weeks  
All musicians can benefit from the skills of reading people. Personality reading and an understanding of personality interaction is another one of those special skills such as Perfect Pitch which can give a musician a distinctive competitive edge, increase his or her ability to negotiate the difficulties of relationship and enhance management skills, while interacting with them musically or in life settings. Musicians generally already have the advantage that they understand the principle of resonance, in which sound energy transfers from one system to another through an interposing medium such as wood, water, or air, but not a vacuum. Nevertheless, the principle of resonance extends to massless systems as well, such as can be seen with tuned radio or tv antennas for electromagnetic radiation, or the chakras of the human body for energies not known to western science. (Resonance also figures into the principles discussed by GI Gurdjieff, where 'foods' that enter us from outside our organism are resonant with materials already within us – enzymes, for example – after which they are digested. This is in contrast with the internal stages of digestion, which he describes as a 'blending' of non-resonant materials to get a material of an order and having a state falling between the other two.)

Students will learn to identify the typical personality resonances and make efforts to objectively sense the nature of their relationships with people having other personality types as their centers of gravity. Various exercises will be introduced to assist the student to experience unfamiliar types in their healthy upside, which is invaluable. Adventurous students, primarily songwriters and composers, may also briefly explore the unhealthy downsides of these personalities for the purpose of depiction in their art. Emphasis will also be placed on techniques for avoiding the downsides of one's own personality and that of others, which is of particular usefulness to performing artists who would be masters of themselves, their instruments and their art.

Students will also learn to objectively and scientifically type personality using cutting-edge database research coupled with ancient Eastern systems and to apply it to musical instrument preferences, musical aptitudes and preferential styles. Students will further learn to access these aspects of themselves for the purpose of becoming better musicians and human beings. Interactions between personalities will be explored, within the context of musical production. This is a not-to-be-missed study for serious musicians from all ethnic backgrounds, instruments, musical styles and experiences that has life changing and career enhancing implications.(design your program now)

TRAININGS


PHYSICAL CONDITIONING FOR MUSICIANS
10 Weeks  
"Mens sana in corpore sano." ("A sound mind in a sound body.")

Music making, like other arts, is a highly distilled composite expression of our three functional brains (physical, emotional, intellectual*); the result of many successively finer processes within each of the brains and their associated 'bodies'. For these processes to all function well, there must be available to us a tremendous amount of biological energy, which is sourced by the physical body.

Physical conditioning is concerned with having a strong generator of this energy and a solid platform for support of the higher functions of each functional brain. After an explanation of the mechanisms whereby this energy is created, we will look at a number of approaches to building, conserving and utilizing it, by no means exhaustive but nevertheless extraordinary, because no one method is sufficient for the quantity of energy and support required for mastery or artistry. Students will develop a daily regimen designed to build attention and will, and to strengthen the functioning of their physical organisms.(design your program now)

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR MUSICIANS
10 Weeks  
Expression in music, whether, of the second brain (through tone, fine motor movement of the hands, smooth movement and gesture, posture, facial expression), of the first brain (through rhythmic movement, percussion and percussive sounds), or of the third brain (in melody, tonality, interesting harmony, counterpoint, lyrics, arranging & orchestration), requires careful attention to the elements of musical styles and one's ability to resonate with them. Such resonance is complicated by struggling with our general incapacities to feel and empathize, that is, to know what and how we are feeling at all times, to know how others are feeling or emoting as often and as best we can, and to realize our relationship with others at all times. These capacities must be identified and grown for us to successfully resonate in all situations. Music, which has been characterized as "the language of emotion" is actually a language of expression for all three brains. It is first of all, pre-verbal or imitative of speech, but may also have lyrics. Finally, messages in music may be mixed, just as they are in real life. A true professional human musician will be able to sort out these messages and to understand and employ the effects of their expression.

Students will complete assignments and be given exercises for the thorough exploration of these matters for the development of emotional expression. Mixed messages, while possibly fascinating, destroy emotional coherence; students will also explore their causes and preventions.(design your program now)

VIBRATIONAL SENSITIZING FOR MUSICIANS
10 Weeks
If music is based on vibration, why do musicians need to study it, what is it and what is the 'vibrational world'? This is best described by example:

What's the vibe? Are you the least bit superstitious? Have you ever felt you're being watched? Did you ever feel "I have to get out of here."? Do you have any experience of luck? Have you ever felt deja vu? Have you ever met a person or seen a place that immediately seems to have extraordinary significance to your life? Do you experience the presence of supernatural entities?

In addition to the examples above, the 'vibrational world' also concerns the so-called 'higher emotions' or impulses, such as peace/tranquillity, fairness, orderliness, individuality and good judgement. Ignoring these aspects is tantamount to ignoring the 25% of your audience whose personalities call the vibrational world "home," which a professional or serious musician cannot afford to do. Attending to them, can allow you your musical expression of all styles to contain these higher elements and thus resonate with and appeal to more people outwardly and help you resonate with them internally for yourself. (It should be noted that, while important, the impulses of the vibrational world are subordinate to such functions as faith, hope and love and conscience.)

Students will strive to identify, in real-time, the emanations of the 'vibrational world', both human and musical. This effort is particularly useful for students who wish to develop a spiritual side to their music and/or identify aspects of music which may be beyond the ordinary manifestations of human life, that is, extraordinary. About this, see "Spiritual Evolution." (design your program now)


INTELLECTUAL TRAINING FOR MUSICIANS
10 Weeks
While in the physical and emotional aspects of music making, will and attention are very important, the intellectual aspect cannot be expressed at all without them.  Melody, tonality, interesting harmony, counterpoint, lyrics, arranging & orchestration are fundamentally dependent on the third brain's ability to abstract and symbolize through the focusing of attention, directed by will. In fact, an excess of attention is necessary, if one is to attend at once to the expressions of each brain, but nowhere is it so obvious as in fugue, in which multiple melodies weave through each other.

Students work with various attention-building and focusing exercises, then apply them to music, in order to begin to identify the taste of the workings of will and attention in the intellectual aspects of music. The capacities of attention are explored and exercised with respect to music making. (design your program now)


SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION FOR MUSICIANS
10 Weeks
There is music which belongs to none of the ordinary worlds: physical, vibrational, emotional, intellectual.

Careful reading of the previous descriptions may lead the serious student to an inkling of why it is necessary to prepare by studying the above subjects as a foundation, for exploring the esoteric spiritual possibilities which certain music may embody and provide. For example, while some impressions contained in music may be food for ordinary development, some may be food for extraordinary assimilation. While some individuals may be sufficiently advanced to realize extraordinary expression directly, we usually need some help.

Musicians instinctively realize that music can be a door to many extraordinary experiences, including the normal and abnormal and beyond them. (design your program now)

WORKSHOPS
(There is no overlap between any of the Workshops. Precocious students who elect multiple courses will really have their hands (and minds) full.)
WORKSHOPS: Superchops

SUPERCHOPS FOR GUITARISTS
SuperChops has been greatly expanded from the core foundation originally developed by Howard Roberts, legendary guitarist and founder of the Guitar Institute of Technology (now Musician's Institute), as the basic training and learning philosophy there. Howard was known for having the strongest hands of any professional. These are the techniques that helped him maintain his position for many years as the number one studio call in Los Angeles, often working three sessions a day.(design your program now)

SUPERCHOPS FOR SOLOISTS
SuperChops/Solo is for players of all instruments who want to rapidly develop and maintain superior technical chops in the four essential areas critical to solo mastery: arpeggios, embellishment, intonation and thematic development. Many top players use this system daily to keep their edge. (design your program now)

WORKSHOPS:Chordologies

CHORDOLOGY FOR GUITARISTS
Chordology/Gtr is the course we designed for Howard Roberts' Playback Publishing, now expanded to include advanced harmonic applications of sparse voicings and linear voiceleading which was pioneered by George Van Eps and Howard, but imitated by many pros.
(design your program now)

CHORDOLOGY FOR KEYBOARDISTS
Chordology/Kbd is for all instrumentalists who want to have a large harmonic palette at their disposal. (design your program now)

INTENSIVES

5 WEEK PERFORMANCE BOOTCAMP
Designed for high-school level musicians who need get up to speed for USSCM Diploma programs.(design your program now)