An Introduction to Songwriting

An open book of sheet music on a stand, showing pages filled with musical notes

Course Dates

Key Features

Welcome week (Week 0)

Purpose:

personal introductions
introducing the course
useful reading
personal objectives

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week, the students should have:

become familiar with navigating around the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and from VLE to links and back
test your ability to access files and the web conferencing software and sort out any problems with the help of the Technology Enhanced Learning team
learn how to look for, assess and reference internet resources
contribute to a discussion forum to introduce yourself to other students and discuss why you are interested in the course and what you hope to get out of your studies

Teaching week 1: Your creative identity

Purpose:

In the first week, we will begin to explore the question of who we are, and who we would like to be, as songwriters. We will start the course with the making of your personal creative family tree, and from that we will begin to formulate an idea of your individual creative identity. Exercises that spin off from this exercise include the generation of your very own inspiration playlists, and the identification of musical heroes and villains. We will start a group playlist (everyone adds one song they like a week) which we can continue to grow throughout the course.

Learning outcomes:

to think about who you want to be as a songwriter
to think about your creative 'voice'
to identify your influences
to research who influenced your influences

Teaching week 2: How do songs work?

Purpose:

This week, we will start to look at how songs work, lifting the hood and examining how components lock together. We will listen to some exemplary songs together by such masters as Cole Porter and Bob Dylan and start dissecting them, looking at how they are constructed and what makes them land. We will look at different song structures such as the ABABCAB, the AABA, and others. Then, using techniques such as song maps, we will start building our own songs with a conscious eye on structure, shape and genre. We will add another song each to the playlist.

Learning outcomes:

to develop a greater understanding of different song structures
to develop a greater awareness of the person and voice in song

Teaching week 3: How do songs happen?

Purpose:

Songs rarely just come out of nowhere. Most songwriters have a series of exercises and disciplines to maintain their practice, so that when inspiration does strike, they are ready for it. We will look at some of the best creative exercises that you can carry out into the world after the course has ended to keep your practice going. We will look at the power of daily journaling and artists’ dates, creative square breathing, and ideas of crop rotation and ambient knowledge, to give them courage, strength, and flexibility both for the duration of this course and beyond. These techniques create the spaces where songs bubble up. We will add another song each to the group playlist.

Learning outcomes:

to investigate tools that enable songs to come
to investigate tools that will allow you to develop your creativity

Teaching week 4: Writing the words (to the tunes)

Purpose:

Using Laura Barton’s episode ‘Words’ of her ‘Notes on Music’ radio series, and Pat Pattison as a basis for this week focused on lyric writing, we focus on rhyme, internal rhyme and mouth feel of songs, why some words ‘sing’ better than others, and how we go about writing lyrics which express the paradox of expressing the universal in the particular. We will experiment with different lyrical forms to see which works; we’ll try David Bowie’s cut-up technique with some newspapers, and we’ll try to figure out why some lyrics work, why some don’t. We will all add another song to the playlist.

Learning outcomes:

to develop a heightened understanding of how to achieve connection with your lyrics
to develop a heightened understanding of lexical rhythm and rhyme
to inspire a new confidence to write lyrics that avoid cliché

Teaching week 5: Writing tunes (to words) - chords, melodies, meanings, hooks

Purpose:

This week we’ll think about how the music part happens: how we find chord sequences (and try some fun ideas such as dice technique or Brian Eno’s 50 cards), melodies (taking a look at Jack Perricone), how music has meaning (see Kramer and that top note in ‘Heidelroslein’) and the endless quest for hooks. This is really a celebration of play this week: it’s important to play, to rummage, to open the mind and allow melodies to come in, and a melody rarely arrives when you’re looking straight on. We’ll practise the art of playing around and see what arrives. And we’ll add another song to the playlist.