Songwriting Basics 3

Expand your songwriting with more advanced techniques that help you create songs that resonate emotionally with your listeners.

This four-week course teaches a number of specific tools to enhance your lyrics and music—and how they work together to greater effect. You'll explore how to craft compelling lyrics by using metaphors, similes, and rhyme schemes, while ensuring that your lyrics carry emotional depth. You'll learn how to map emotional arcs within your lyrics to connect on a deeper level with your audience.

The course explores various musical modes and how they can color your songs, elevating both melody and harmony to match the emotions you're expressing in your lyrics. You'll learn to recognize and use the characteristic notes and chords of major and minor modes, such as Ionian, Mixolydian, and Aeolian, among others, to enhance your songwriting.

You'll work on refining one of your original songs, applying professional formatting techniques and cleaning up the lyrics to ensure clarity and consistency. You'll explore how small tweaks—like adjusting line lengths, rhyme consistency, and word choices—can have a huge impact on the overall feel of your song.

By the end of the course, you'll not only have a completed song, but you'll also have a deeper understanding of the songwriting process from start to finish, equipping you with the tools to craft emotionally impactful music.

What you will learn:

✔ Create vivid, emotionally engaging song lyrics using metaphor, simile, and varied rhyme schemes
✔ Identify and utilize major and minor modes (Ionian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Dorian, Phrygian) to create songs with specific emotional tones
✔ Map out the emotional arc within a song's lyrics to help you strengthen the journey you take your listeners on
✔ Apply professional formatting and refinement techniques to revise and finalize a song for greater impact

Prerequisite Skills:

• Completion of Songwriting Basics 1 and Songwriting Basics 2, or equivalent knowledge and/or experience.