Songwriting: Writing, Arranging, and Producing Music Specialization

There’s a songwriter lurking somewhere inside you, peeking around corners, wondering if it’s safe to come out. Now it is. This course is an invitation to let your inner songwriter step into the sunlight. All it takes is a simple “yes” and you’ll be climbing that windy hill, marveling at the view.

If you haven’t written any or many songs, this course will show you an efficient, effective process for tailoring songs to express your ideas and emotions. If you have, you’ll look at your process differently, taking control of aspects of the process you may have not noticed. The course will start by examining the tools available to you, all revolving around the essential concept of prosody. You’ll learn to use your tools to enhance your message—to work compositionally at the same time you’re developing your ideas. You’ll be working both lyrically and musically, though musically it’s not necessary that you either read music or play an instrument. If you play, great, and you’ll be encouraged to play and record your musical responses to the assignments. If you don’t play, the course offers you a number of musical loops to work with. All you’ll have to do is sing your melodies over the loops. Assignments will ask you to post something for peer review—sometimes lyric lines or sections, sometimes melodies, sometimes both. None of it has to be polished. The course is about writing, not performing. Most important, you’ll have a lot of fun.

If your notebook is full of unused lyrics and you’re struggling to find inspiration for the music, this course is for you. Whether you are an experienced songwriter looking for new ideas or a beginning songwriter learning to read music, this course will lead you to a rich source of songwriting possibilities.

Led by award winning songwriter and Berklee College of Music professor Scarlet Keys, you’ll learn to construct strong, expressive melodies that your audience will remember as well as experiment with new chords to break out of any harmonic rut. Whether you are new to writing music or are looking for new ideas to change up your songs, this class will teach you how to make deliberate choices with your harmonies and melodies to best emulate the emotions you want your audience to feel. You will start by discovering common chord progression and tying specific emotions to each chords in a scale. Then you will practice changing the harmonic and melodic rhythm of a song to better highlight important lyrics. Finally, you will learn to create melodic hooks and simple techniques to help you generate new melodic ideas.

You've created a song. You wrote the lyrics, decided on the melody, and maybe even recorded a simple demo. Now what? If you have a basic knowledge of how to use a digital audio workstation (DAW) and are passionate about being a songwriter, this course will help you take your song from a simple recording on your phone to a fully arranged song ready for the recording studio.

You will be learning from two Berklee College of Music Songwriting professors, Bonnie Hayes and Sarah Brindell. They will show you how to arrange original songs in a digital audio workstation. You will learn tools to heighten the emotional response of your listeners and you'll broaden your understanding of instrumentation and how to add sounds to your song without distracting the listener from the most important aspect: the vocalist.