Stop teaching genres and start reverse-engineering them. Edwards hands you the listening tools to decode any style — and teach it the very next lesson.

Pop, country, rock and rap now blend into one another, so the old style boxes no longer help you teach. In this crash course, Matthew Edwards shows you how to reverse-engineer any sound instead. You'll work through high- and low-energy emotional markers, inflection and phrase weighting, pure versus 'living' vowels (with real-time MRI of a singer's tongue in legit versus pop-rock), and a full menu of onsets and releases: clean, aspirate, glottal, shadow vowel, yodel flip, cry, fry, growl, scoop and fall-off. Then rhythm — backbeat, blue notes, swung eighths, back phrasing, anticipation, syncopation — plus when a riff is actually earned. Recorded audio examples throughout, with Q&A.