Berkleemusic’s 4-course Basic Music Certificate for Army Musicians provides the fundamental knowledge and concepts behind the Berklee approach to theory and ear training for contemporary music. This certificate program is designed to help Army Basic Music Course graduates perform their musical duties as they serve in Army bands around the world. It will also help prepare Army Musicians for success in the Advanced Leader Course (ALC).

You’ll start the program with Music Theory 101, which will give you the tools you need to start mastering the nuts and bolts of music. You’ll dig into the fundamental building blocks of music—pitch, rhythm, scales, intervals, chords, and harmony—and learn how they flow together to make a song work. By the end of this course in the program, you’ll be able to read and write musical notation both on paper and using software, write a simple melody, find and play notes on a piano keyboard, and understand the basic concepts behind scales, intervals, and chords.

Next up is Basic Ear Training 1 where you will use exercises and contemporary songs by artists like Dave Matthews, Jimi Hendrix, and Miles Davis to understand the harmonies, rhythms, and pulses that drive and measure music. You will learn to identify and transcribe rhythms and time signatures, conduct basic rhythms, identify the difference between major and minor, understand and sing the relationships between pitches using the solfege (do-re-mi) method, and recognize the basic elements of song structure.

Continuing on from the fundamental knowledge presented in Music Theory 101, Music Theory 201 covers more complex chords, progressions, and rhythms that will further your understanding of the elements of contemporary music. You'll learn why chords move from one to another the way they do, and study the more sophisticated rhythms that happen in pop music and jazz, including rhythmic anticipation and syncopations. Through ear training exercises, musical examples, and personalized feedback from your instructor, you'll be able to analyze, read, write, and listen more effectively, as well as understand the fundamental knowledge essential to the beginning studies of harmony. Class topics include: advanced notation issues; diatonic triads and seventh chords in both major and harmonic minor; the use of melodic and harmonic tension, the II-V-I chord progression; and culminates in a discussion of augmented harmonies and pentatonic scales.

The final course in the program, Harmonic Ear Training, will help you to put your harmonic theory into practice. In this course, you’ll learn techniques that will improve your performance, arranging, and compositional skills by refining your ability to really hear and recognize what is going on within the chord progressions.

By the end of this certificate program you’ll have a concrete musical foundation in theory and ear training, and the musical tools ready at your disposal to create your next music project with ease.