Last week I completed another Coursera course, so of course I should write a blog post about it. The course I completed was called Songwriting. When I first saw the course listing on the Coursera website I thought "That looks interesting, why don't I give it a go? It's free after all.", so I signed up and waited for it to start.
Before I go into a more in-depth discussion of the course (as seems to be my MO with these blog posts now) I will say that I never considered myself to be creative, or at least not creative in the way that a songwriter is creative. Yet, having completed this course I was very surprised at how easy it was to come up with lyrics for songs, especially for the week 5 assignment, where we had to write our first full song. So, with that said, here is an overview of what I did for each week of the 6-week course.
Week 1 - The Journey of a Song
The first week of the course gave an introduction to the course and what we would be expected to achieve by the end. We then moved into the course proper. The focus was on the idea of a song, introducing the idea of prosody - having all the elements of the song come to together to tell the same story. The video lectures talked about song forms, identifying the point of view of the song, the development engine, and introduced the boxes for creating the idea of a song. The peer review assignment for the end of the first week was to take one of the supplied song titles (or a title of our own) and, using the boxes, describe the point of view of the song and how it would move through the boxes, showing how the title would gain more meaning as it passes through each box.
This was a nice gentle start to the assignments and didn't just drop you in the deep end by having you write lyrics from week 1. This easy(ish) start made the course seem a lot less daunting than it did before I started.
Week 2 - Stopping and Going
In the next week we looked more at prosody and the ideas of stability and instability in a song. This idea was fascinating and since doing the course it has made me appreciate the music I listen to so much more, where I now can sometimes notice where stability and instability have been used to emphasise a part of a song. This week looked at how the number of lines and the lengths of lines within a song can create stability and instability.
The end of week assignment involved us writing some lyrics for the first time. We had to write an unstable verse and a stable chorus, using the number of lines and line lengths to create the stability and instability. I took what I had learned and wrote my first ever verse and chorus and was quite pleased with it. My peers seemed to like it too and I got a modest grade for it. Completing the first assignment that involved actually writing lyrics gave me a lot of confidence to continue with the course and I was looking forward to each assignment, although I was always doubting that I'd be able to complete them.
Week 3 - Sonic GPS—Mapping Your Song with Rhyme
Now we were building up quite a few tools for the creation of our songs, with the next important tool being rhyme. The video lectures went through all the different sorts of rhymes and how each type helped to create stability or instability. Once again, the lessons were fascinating and gave a great insight into rhyme that, being a beginner to this sort of thing, was something I hadn't realised. I thought that there were only perfect rhymes and you couldn't rhyme words like 'bent' and 'mend', but you can, they are just different sorts of rhymes and they help to create different ideas in your songs.
The week 3 assignment was similar to the week 2 assignment, except this time we had to write a stable verse and an unstable chorus, using all the things we had learnt so far, including rhymes. Again, I gave it a good go and got a reasonable grade for it in the peer review, along with some useful feedback.
Week 4 - Making it Move
So far, most of the lessons have looked at the lyrics alone without really involving any music. That was to change in week 4. Now we were looking at how the lyrics match up with the beat and rhythm of the music. We learnt about stressed syllables within our lines, and how these should be matched to the stressed beats in the music. We also learnt about how you can play with these ideas to make the song "move" - creating motion and momentum in your song so the listener feels like they are going on a journey.
The assignment for this week was what I was looking forward to least. The assignment was to take our verse and chorus from the week 3 assignment and to record ourselves speaking the lyrics along to a musical loop, making sure we placed the stressed syllables on the stressed beats. I was not looking forward to this because I really don't like hearing my voice or recording my voice, let alone letting anyone else hear it. But, with some encouragement from my wonderful fiance and some time alone in the house so nobody could hear me do it, I completed the assignment. Once again, I got some useful feedback and a pretty good grade for it. We were getting closer to writing our own song and I still didn't think I'd be able to do it.
Week 5 - Writing the Song
So, here it was, time to write our first ever song. The tutor helped us through this process by taking us through his process to write a new song of his own, so he was effectively writing a song with us. The biggest things introduced during this week were the use of melody and the use of a song worksheet.
The use of melody was the hardest part of the course for me to get my head around. I'm not a very musical person and a lot of the talk of stable and unstable notes went over my head. Thankfully, my fiance is a lot more musical than I am so helped me out with the melody for what would become my first ever song.
The worksheet though, was invaluable to me being able to complete the week 5 assignment in time. The assignment involved writing and performing a complete song (we didn't have to create music for it, there were many musical loops provided that we could perform the song over, which is what I did). The worksheet was used to create a list of keywords for the song and, using a rhyming dictionary, to create lists of words that rhymed (different types of rhymes) with each keyword. This gave me a nice long list of words to use and gave me lots of inspiration for how the song would progress.
My completed worksheet, showing the keywords and rhymes I found.
Once the song had been written (it took me about 3 days to write the worksheet and lyrics) it was time to add the melody and record it. As mentioned, I had a lot of help from my fiance creating the melody for the song but that wasn't all. She is (in my opinion) a great singer and so much better than me, with bags more confidence when it comes to recording herself, so after asking really nicely, she agreed to sing the song for me for the assignment. I should point out that the assignment states that it is a songwriting course, not a singing course, so the quality of singing doesn't matter, but I had no confidence that I'd be able to do it and didn't want to drop out of the course because of it. Anyway, she recorded the song for me and it sounded pretty good. I was very happy with it and I submitted it. The song was called "The End of Cold" and was a journey through the seasons to find love.
I was very nervous waiting for the peer reviews for this assignment; it was my first ever song and I had no idea what people would think of it. In the end I needn't have worried, I got a really good grade for it and some really nice comments from my peers, in particular this one (the marking is anonymous so there is no name attached to the comment):
"Yeah! The line end of cold has a neat melody. The lyrics are great! Epic actually. Frickin' Epic! I would like to hear it with music designed for you specifically. I like the lyrics a lot! You are a good writer! Nice!"That comment in particular made me feel really good about what I'd managed after just 5 weeks of this course.
Week 6 - Crossing the Finished Line
This final week of the course looked at how to work on the song to improve it, keeping in mind the idea of prosody. The video lectures focussed on a song that had been written and looked at how things could be changed to create a much better song. We looked at what front-heavy and back-heavy lines are and how they can used to add meaning to your song. Using these ideas we then had to work on our song from the week 5 assignment and make changes to it to improve it. As I was quite happy with my song from week 5 I only made a few minor changes to the song and got my fiance to re-record it for me. Thankfully, my week 5 grade was not a fluke and I got another really good grade for it and some more really nice feedback comments from my peers.
A shot of my lyric sheet with various notes showing the changes it went through from the first draft.
Final Thoughts
I very much enjoyed this course, considering it to be one of my favourite courses that I've completed on Coursera. The tutor had an excellent presence on the videos and felt perfectly at ease talking to a camera. This made the course a lot more engaging and kept my interest better than for some other courses I have taken part in. the quizzes were good at checking our knowledge and, although they said at the start of the course that we would need to have a list of songs that would be looked at during the course, they were all available on YouTube in some way so access to all of the songs looked at was possible. The assignments were very well structured, starting off easy and gradually building up to writing a full song. Doing this really did help to build up my confidence to be able to write a whole song by the end of the course.
During the peer reviews, I had to review a number of assignments that were submitted by people who had previous songwriting and performing experience, so there seemed to be a wide range of experience levels taking the course. This didn't detract from the course, although I did occasionally find it difficult to give useful feedback to those peers that clearly had substantially more experience than me.
Overall, I would very strongly recommend this course to anyone, particularly those with no experience of songwriting and who had never thought of writing songs before and who want to try something new. I had a blast taking this course and honestly surprised myself with how well I did in the end. I didn't think I would finish the course with a score of 88.3%, that's for sure.
And finally, with very kind permission of my fiance (you are amazing, my love, I love you and can't wait to marry you), you can listen to my week 6 assignment song here. I have also posted the lyrics of the song below so you can follow along and join in if you like. Feel free to let me know what you think of it in the comments below.
The End of Cold
Gazing out, over my kingdom
From this throne,
Of ice and snow,
Looking for something of distinction
To break this land of dark unknown,
Of white extinction
Determined to withhold
The end of cold?
Out of the mist, Nature's first bloom
You grab my hand, dragged from this gloom.
Together forward,
Stumbling, awkward,
Messy, disordered.
Swept up in the rush, riding a flume,
Towards our pot of gold,
The end of cold.
Light in the tunnel
Keep moving on
Light in the tunnel
Don't want to stumble.
Now sitting together, facing the sun
Looking ahead, it's gonna be fun
Basking in joy, each other we've found
Once icy land, now our playground
What a sight to behold,
The end of cold.
The end of cold.
