School    Online Courses   Songwriting 

Expand your songwriting and lyric writing skills, and express yourself more effectively though words and music.

• Film Scoring 101

  Donald Wilkins

  Create original music to accompany a visual medium by learning fundamental to more advanced film scoring techniques.

• Lyric Writing: Tools and Strategies

  Pat Pattison

  Generate more and better ideas. Express them in compelling and original ways.

• Songwriting: Writing Hit Songs

  James A. Kachulis

  Move your listeners and express yourself more effectively by crafting your songs the way hit writers do.

• Songwriting for Film and TV

  Brad Hatfield

  Explore the techniques of writing music that will appeal specifically to music supervisors, editors, directors, and producers across any number of different genres.

• Music Composition for Film and TV

  Ben Newhouse

  Learn to write music in the style of big budget Hollywood films and TV programs. Analyze melody, harmony, counterpoint, tempo, rhythm, and orchestration in a variety of genres to gain a complete “recipe book” for writing for film and TV.

• Lyric Writing: Writing From the Title

  Pat Pattison

  Make your writing process more efficient and your lyrics more effective. Learn how to find a powerful and effective song title, and discover how to build lyrics, develop the rhythms of your song sections, create contrasting sections and ideas to re-color your chorus based on that title.

• Lyric Writing: Writing Lyrics to Music

  Pat Pattison

  Get the most out of your lyrics by learning how to combine them accurately and effectively with melody.

• Songwriting: Melody

  James A. Kachulis

  Learn to construct strong, expressive melodies that your audiences will remember.

• Songwriting: Harmony

  James A. Kachulis

  Learn how harmony can help you to articulate the essential meaning of a song, and the best ways to adapt chords and progressions to suit your unique songwriting style and ideas.

• Jazz Composition

  Joseph Mulholland

  Learn effective techniques that will help you compose jazz tunes that have a balance of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic appeal.

• Commercial Songwriting Techniques

  Andrea Stolpe

  Learn to write for commercial success by reproducing the time-tested characteristics of hit songs while maintaining your own unique voice.

• Jingle Writing

  Peter Bell

  Gain a practical working knowledge of how to compose, produce, market and monetize commercial music in three important categories: Jingles, Library Music, and Television Theme music and scoring.

• Hip-Hop Writing and Production

  Michael Hamilton

  Learn the techniques that hip-hop producers use to create hit songs. Learn writing and production considerations unique to hip-hop, how to analyze and recreate different styles of hip-hop, and how to use this foundation to produce your own songs using Propellerhead’s Reason software.

• Music Notation Using Finale

  Jonathan Feist

  Create great-looking music quickly and easily with the powerful Finale music notation software, and learn techniques to maximize speed, control, and accuracy.

• Music Notation Using Sibelius

  Tom Rudolph

  Learn to create lead sheets, choral and instrumental scores, drum maps and guitar notation, and explore many other ways to use Sibelius for your own personal and professional needs.

• Creative Writing: Finding Your Voice

  Pat Pattison

  Creative Writing: Finding Your Voice is designed to help you write clearly and strongly in your own unique voice, bringing your full self to your writing process every time you write.

• Creative Writing: Poetry

  Pat Pattison

  Learn to craft and control your writing, enhance your ideas, and write better lyrics through the study of poetry.

• Composing and Producing Electronic Music

  Loudon Stearns

  Composing and Producing Electronic Music will teach you the necessary tools and techniques to create contemporary electronic music in a variety of styles, including drum and bass, trance, glitch, dub, electro, minimal, downtempo, house, and techno. If you are musician interested in adding an electronic flavor to your production, or an electronic producer interested in moving your pieces to the next level, this course is for you!

• World Music Composition Styles

  Phillip Sheeran

  Add depth and flavor to compositions in any genre by studying the characteristics of a wide array of world music compositional techniques.

• Creative Writing: Literature Studies for Musicians

  Suzanne Cope

  Strengthen your writing skills and creative expression by exploring and learning from the works of musician-writers and those for whom music has had a profound influence.

Faculty Comments

"The best way to learn about writing is to write. There is a little writing every day in these courses--5 days a week for 12 weeks. Never too much, but, by the end, you'll be amazed at how much your writing has improved. With a lot of help from the students who went through the courses, as well as from the marvelous team at Berkleemusic.com, the courses have been polished and refined into real gems. I'm thrilled with the results."
-Pat Pattison, Online Instructor of Lyric Writing: Tools and Strategies, Lyric Writing: Writing from the Title, and Lyric Writing: Writing Lyrics to Music

Student Comments

"Since I expanded my writing skills in Pat Pattison's course, I have regularly received phone calls from people around Britain saying that they need to have my music. The reactions to my songs have been amazing"
-L Flowers