Coursera Songwriting (curso) d3f4v

Coursera Songwriting

Update and Thank You! Hope you are well. I wanted to share a few important notes: • • The Lesson 6 Assignment is due on Thursday. The peer review deadline is Sunday. • • Students earning a minimum score of 70 will receive a Statement of Accomplishment. Statements will be available at http://www.coursera.org//records by next Tuesday. • • Please take the time to complete the Post-Course Survey at https://class.coursera.org/songwriting-007/quiz/start? quiz_id=174. Your will help improve the course. You can also find a link to the survey on the left navigation of the class site. As the course is coming to an end, I want to say what a treat it’s been, and what a great learning experience for me. Teaching stimulates more learning for me than anything else. When I try to articulate something clearly enough for someone else to understand it, it takes on a whole new look. One of my favorite bands in the 60’s was Procol Harum. Here’s a snippet of a lyric from their third album, Shine on Brightly, that’s been with me for all these decades: The lesson lies in learning And by teaching I’ll be taught For there’s nothing hidden anywhere It’s all there to be sought I’ve learned a bunch from your posts: such thoughtful and interesting discussions. You’ve not only helped me clarify some of my ideas and ways of presenting the material, but you’ve also alerted me to trouble spots that we’ll try to

address the next time we offer the course again, over the summer. The peer review process certainly stirred the pot and started a good deal of productive conversation. From my viewpoint, peer review is valuable not because of the grades and comments you get back, but because you have to assess the work of others. That's where real learning takes place, because it takes you a step deeper into the whole thing: learning by doing, then learning by trying to articulate the principles to other folks. I hope that has happened for everyone in this class. Priceless. Recently, when my new book, Songwriting Without Boundaries, came out, I did a seminar tour that included Boston, Austin, Nashville, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and a few other cities, taking attendees through some of the concepts of the book: four 14-day sense-bound writing and metaphor challenges. Here's a description from my Introduction: Each challenge asks you to concentrate on a different facet of your writer, to explore, not only how you think, but the stuff of your senses, then to relate those senses to the outer world, transforming them into metaphor. The first 14-day challenge, Object Writing, asks you to respond to three prompts each day, of 10 minutes, 5 minutes, and 90 seconds. It will help you be more vivid and specific in your writing, and the timed writing will help your speed and efficiency. The second challenge is on metaphor. It asks you to use your new-found skill at sense-bound writing in a step-by-step process for finding metaphors. By the time you finish, you should be a pro. This challenge also contains timed writing to help you chop away the underbrush in your writing faster. Then challenge 3 asks you to extend metaphors, learn to

explore them deeply, and see them from reversed directions: both “a pack of hungry wolves is a hurricane,” and also “a hurricane is a pack of hungry wolves.” You’ll write a 5 or 10 minute response to each prompt, mostly four pieces each day. The final challenge asks you to do it all in rhythm and rhyme. Again, because the writing is timed, it forces you to go deep, quick. It teaches you to think ahead rhythmically and manipulate rhyme more fluidly. In every city, seminar participants formed groups to take the challenges together. Some groups as few as 5 or 6, some up to 30. They put together Facebook pages for posting, or just did it through email, depending on the size of the group. The was fantastic. Everyone raved about the challenges, their growth as writers, and the relationships they cemented by committing to the process. I'd love to see the same thing happen here. You've made some great connections through Coursera: you know each other's music. You've made friends. I'd love it if you formed some 14-day challenge groups to carry on life after Coursera. :) Give it a try. My deepest appreciation and thanks to the wonderful staff at Berklee Online. It's no wonder the school has won the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA)'s "Best Online College Course" award 8 years in a row. I encourage you check out my five online courses: • • Lyric Writing: Tools and Strategies • • Lyric Writing: Writing Lyrics to Music • • Lyric Writing: Writing From the Title • • Creative Writing: Poetry

• • Creative Writing: Finding Your Voice • Just go to www.patpattison.com and click on Online Courses. Finally, my thanks to Coursera for the opportunity to reach so many people at the same time. Amazing. Thank you all for such a rich and rewarding experience. Write Fearlessly, Pat Mon 1 Sep 2014 9:00 AM PDT

Week 6 Week 6's materials will go live today at 12:00 p.m. New York time. The assignment is due on Thursday. The peer review evaluations will be due on Sunday. This week, you’ll be working on phrasing, the “body language” of your song. I’ll work through a song called “Pieces,” adjusting its phrasing to the emotion of the lines, and then apply the principles to “Hobo Wind.” Your job this week is to apply the phrasing principles to the song you worked on in week 5. You’ll be surprised at how dramatically things can change with a few simple phrasing adjustments. Also, I wanted to share some good news with you. Berklee Online is going to award scholarships to two students who have actively participated in the class forums and given guidance to their fellow students. The scholarship will allow the selected students to take one of my Berklee Online courses—with a faculty member working with them for 12 weeks—with the full tuition waived. If your name is selected, Berklee Online will you by email. Cheers, Pat Mon 25 Aug 2014 9:00 AM PDT

Week 5 Congratulations on your work in week 4. There has been some wonderful conversation in the Forums about preserving the natural shape of language in music. It's a rich topic, one I developed a full 12-week course on at Berklee Online called Lyric Writing: Writing Lyrics to Music. Also, check out my recent interview with Jonathan Feist, Why Rhyme?, in his Writing About Music blog. Week 5's material will be ready today at 12:00 p.m. New York time. It's a big lesson! You have a pretty full tool belt by now, and it’s time to apply your tools to a complete song. In week 5, you’ll start a new song, beginning with a new title. First, of course, make sure you develop your title so it “gains weight” each time you repeat it. I’ll be working with my own title, "Hobo Wind," and taking it through the same process I want you to follow with your title. Now you’ll see why you spent so much time working on rhyme and rhyme types. You’ll go through a brainstorming process (called a “worksheet”) that uses a rhyming dictionary as a search engine for ideas—before you start writing the song. You’ll be amazed how many ideas you’ll get. Because your ideas will connect sonically as well as conceptually, you’ll be composing on two levels, and already have a leg up when you start writing. Next, you’ll write the lines of your sections. If you are writing a chorus, you should concentrate on it first, but don’t load it up with too many ideas. Keep it simple. Save all those ideas for the verses. That’s their job. You’ll work on melodic rhythm and melody, using either your own chords or one of the loops I’ve provided in the Resources section of the class site. Because you’re writing a melody for your song, it will be important for you to match your verses as exactly as you can, so they can accept the same melody.

You’ll see how stable and unstable tones in your melody can create prosody. By the end of the week, we’ll all have a song. This will be fun. Cheers, Pat Mon 18 Aug 2014 9:00 AM PDT

Welcome to Week 4! Welcome to week 4, and good for you for finishing week 3. By now you’re pretty steeped in prosody and its most effective expression, stable and unstable. You’ve seen it at work with four tools so far—number of lines, line lengths, rhyme schemes, and rhyme types. This week, you’ll work with another tool, rhythm. Words have meanings, music doesn’t. Music is all about motion, and motion creates e-motion. As a songwriter, your job is to marry the meanings of language to the emotion of music, enhancing both. The whole should be greater than the sum of the parts. Of course, lyric phrases contain motion too: rhythm produced by arranging stressed and unstressed syllables into patterns. Your job is to marry lyric rhythms to musical rhythms as accurately and perfectly as you can. Your goal in this marriage is always the same: you must preserve the natural shape of the language by creating melodic rhythm that matches your syllabic rhythm (patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables) perfectly. This is called setting. It’s one of the core meanings of prosody—the appropriate relationship of elements (in this case, syllabic and melodic rhythms). In order to set stressed and unstressed syllables perfectly with stressed and unstressed notes, you must first understand what creates stress in language and what creates stress in music. That’s what you’ll be looking at this week.

By the end of the week, you’ll understand how to recognize stressed and unstressed syllables, and how to recognize stressed and unstressed notes. You’ll see the two aspects of syllabic stress: in multi-syllable words and in one-syllable words. You’ll see that position in the musical bar is the sole creator of musical stress, and learn to set stressed syllables at stressed positions in the bar, and unstressed syllables at unstressed positions in the bar. You’ll see that accurate setting creates a natural-sounding line, revealing maximum meaning and emotion, while inaccurate setting always diminishes meaning and emotion, and lets air out of the song’s tires. Included in the lesson are four videos from a Master class that I filmed at Berklee to help reinforce the benefits of preserving the natural shape of the language. Also, check out this article on Aligning Your Lyrical Phrases With Your Melodic Phrases. This is where the rubber meets the road. Drive carefully. A note about scheduling your time: spend some time this week familiarizing yourself with using Audacity or GarageBand, and posting to Soundcloud. This will save you time next week, when you will be applying everything that you have learned thus far, and spending a good deal of time recording. Cheers, Pat Mon 11 Aug 2014 9:00 AM PDT

Measuring Line Length Hi Folks, Um, we're going to see in week 4 that line length is best measured by the number of STRESSED syllables in the line. Rather than go into detail here, I've left that complex discussion for week 4. Hang on, it's coming.

I await your thoughts. Cheers, Pat Fri 8 Aug 2014 9:00 AM PDT

Welcome to Week 3! By now you’ve got a sense of the power of prosody—creating stable or unstable structures to stable or unstable ideas. The number of lines you use and the way you match them make a real difference in the motion and e-motion of your sections. By popular demand, I have added a blues loop to the Resources section for you to experiment with. This week, you’ll work with rhyme to help you create prosody. You’ll add two more powerful tools to your tool belt: rhyme schemes and rhyme types. They will add even more depth and flexibility to your writing, giving you two more ways to construct stable and unstable sections. You’ll see how rhyme schemes, by themselves, create a feeling. They can be symmetrical, like aabb (e.g., win/spin/turn/learn) or abab (e.g., win/turn/spin/learn), creating stability. Or, they can be asymmetrical, like abba (e.g., win/turn/learn/spin) or xaaa (e.g., win/turn/learn/yearn), creating levels of instability. All by themselves. So your choice of rhyme scheme makes a difference. Ask, “Is this verse’s idea stable or unstable?” and construct your rhyme scheme accordingly. And you’ll see how the six rhyme types work like musical chords. They can feel stable (perfect rhyme and family rhyme) or unstable to various degrees, using more remote rhyme types. You’ll learn how to open a stable rhyme scheme by using unstable rhyme types. It’s a great tool for keeping your verse rhyme schemes matched, yet keeping the one with a stable idea locked up tight and opening the gate for the other

verse where the idea is less stable. Take a look at Randy Newman’s “Feels Like Home.” The four-line pre-chorus has an xaxa rhyme scheme, but the rhyme types create an unstable first pre-chorus and a perfectly stable second pre-chorus. Eyeopening. By the end of the week, you’ll be comfortable with rhyme schemes and finding rhymes of different types to help color your journey through a song. For homework, you’ll write a new verse and chorus. It’ll be fun. :) Cheers, Pat p.s. I’ve created “week 3” subforums in order for us to continue our discussions in a more organized way. “So many. I had not thought songs had undone so many.” (Extra credit for recognizing the quote I just mangled.) Mon 4 Aug 2014 9:00 AM PDT

Welcome to Week 2! I hope you found last week’s concepts stimulating and useful. They should help you choose and organize your song ideas more effectively. I have really enjoyed all the interaction in the forums—we have an impressive group of songwriters spanning the globe. To help organize some of the dialogue, I have created week 2 subforums in each of the forum areas— let's continue our conversations in these subforums over the course of the next week. Please note that the first assignment is due Thursday, and the peer evaluations are due Sunday. Moving forward, the quizzes will be due on Mondays, a week after the lesson is released. Assignments will be due on Thursdays, 10 days after the lesson's release. Peer review evaluations will be due on Sundays, three days after the assignment's due date. I know

that many of you are quite busy outside of this course, but please keep in mind that songwriting is a lot like playing an instrument. It's better to practice even a little bit each day than to have one long session once a week. I hope that you are able to find even 10 minutes each day to devote to your songwriting. This week we’ll start by looking at the most important concept in songwriting (and, indeed, in all art): prosody. It’s pretty direct and simple: everything in your song should belong there—all aspects of the song should work together to the song’s central message. Common sense, really. But incredibly helpful for the choices you’ll be making as you write. Prosody (“appropriate relationship between elements”) reveals real, practical writing tools that will help you line by line, section by section, song by song to control simple elements—elements that are present in every song you’ll write. Over the next few weeks, you will be exploring five of the compositional elements that can help your song ideas. This week covers two of them: number of lines and line lengths. Every section you write will have either an odd or even number of lines. Right? Right. This week you’ll learn what a big difference the number of lines makes in ing your message. An even number of lines feels stable. An odd number of lines feels unstable. By themselves. They can act like a film score to the feeling you’re trying to create in your song. You’ll also look at the lengths of lines and see how they affect emotion—how they can your song’s message. Again, stable or unstable. You’ll be hearing these two every week. They’re the keys to understanding and creating prosody. At the end of the week, you’ll use these tools to write a verse and chorus.

Buy yourself a tool belt. Let’s start filling it. —Pat Mon 28 Jul 2014 9:00 AM PDT

Welcome to the Songwriting Course! An Updated Welcome! Whether you’re a brand new songwriter or an old hand at it, I hope you’ll find something useful here, something to help you become an even better writer. The course is tool-based, designed to dig into the craft of songwriting, to show you practical strategies and techniques, to reveal options and opportunities you might not have noticed. We’ll cover a lot of territory in the next six weeks. I hope you stay for the whole course. Before diving into the video lectures for lesson 1, be sure to check the Course Schedule, Resources, and Grading Policy pages for useful information about the course. Also, please complete the Student Survey so that I can learn more about you. You can access these pages, including the survey, from the left column of the course site. You can also access the current survey here . This week, you’ll look at strategies for finding and developing song ideas, for creating an interesting journey from the beginning to the end of a song. You’ll look at “the boxes”—a method for testing your song idea to see whether or not it’s able to cross the finished line. You’ll discover an interesting framework to help explore your idea effectively, in addition to strategies for choosing the right point of view and song form for your idea. Be sure you have access to the following songs for this lesson: • • "Eleanor Rigby" (John Lennon/Paul McCartney) performed by

The Beatles • • "One More Dollar" (Gillian Welch) performed by Gillian Welch • • "Still Crazy After All These Years" (Paul Simon) performed by Paul Simon • • "In Front of the Alamo" (Gary Burr) performed by Hal Ketchum • • "It Was a Very Good Year" (Ervin Drake) performed by Frank Sinatra) • • "For No One" (John Lennon/Paul McCartney) performed by The Beatles • • "What’ll I do?" (Irving Berlin) performed by Linda Ronstadt • • "Can’t Be Really Gone" (Gary Burr) performed by Tim McGraw • • "Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig's Tune)" (Joni Mitchell) performed by Joni Mitchell • • "I Can’t Make You Love Me" (Mike Reid/Allen Shamblin) performed by Bonnie Raitt • • "The Great Pretender" (Buck Ram) performed by The Platters • • "Strawberry Wine" (Matraca Berg/Gary Harrison) performed by Deana Carter • • "Why Can't I Have You?" (Ric Ocasek) performed by The Cars • At the end of this week, you’ll pick a song idea and show how you might develop it—without actually writing the song, itself. It’ll be fun. I promise.

—Pat Pattison