The Art of Songwriting

I'm a firm believer in the craft of the creative arts. That is that while the creative spark, the idea, the concept is one of imagination and spontaneous generation, I believe that to fully realise that idea there are tried and trusted methods of transferring that idea in order for it to reach its maximum impact.

Basically, you can have whatever idea you want but unless you know how to make people understand it then it will never be as great as it could have been, and we humans have a pretty set way of comprehending the world. We take things in through particular methods that we have developed over a millennia of trial and error. This is the reason that we write, that languages exist and that when we are confronted with any sensory input be it words on a page, music from a speaker or pictures on a billboard, our minds process all of that input in ways that have developed to allow us to spend as little time as possible on anything that doesn't further our survival.

If you're so inclined you should check out Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. It has nothing to do with the creative arts but it does a hell of a job explaining how the human brain processes ideas, and how understanding this can assist in convincing people to buy things from you.

I believe this idea applies to the creative arts though. It's why painters study nature, colour and technique. Why writers study form and structure of language. Because if you want to make people feel, see or think about something the way that you want them to you need to understand how they go about doing these things.

To this end, when I realised that the thing I was meant to do with my life was music (not be a lawyer like the majority of my other high-achieving friends) I decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to know all about it and do it deliberately and with focus. I set about learning the art of songwriting.

I would have loved to have picked up my life, moved to Boston and enrolled at Berklee College of Music but I simply didn't have the money to do something like that.

So I set about self-educating.

The next best thing to being at Berklee is doing their online courses. However this still posed an issue as it wasn't a whole lot cheaper, well it was, but I still couldn't afford $1200+ per course.

So instead I went through every online songwriting course on the Berklee site, dug out their list of textbooks, and then visited book depository to place my order. I have slowly made my way through most of them now and while it probably hasn't been as efficient or intensive as the full courses I hope that I have managed to learn the majority of the content for a fraction of the price. All up I believe that the books cost me about $150.

I've attended workshops and conferences whenever possible (see my previous post about Song Summit) and when at a Pat Pattison workshop about a year ago he mentioned that he would be doing a free online course for Coursera I jumped online and signed up for the first one.

Berklee Online have graciously delivered a few other courses to the MOOCS platform, including intro to guitar, and music production, jazz improvisation, and musicianship.

I'm currently doing my second round of the songwriting course and am still finding a huge amount of value in it.