The day after FAWM ended, an online songwriting course (offered by Berklee College of Music and taught by Pat Pattison) started up. Imagining all that free time I’d suddenly have when I wasn’t writing 14 songs in a month, I signed up. The first week of the course is now finished. Here’s what we’ve been up to. The course itself involves video lectures (short ones – no more than 15 minutes each), quizzes (the first week there were four of them) and weekly assignments that involve walking through the songwriting process (slowly!) by writing plans for, or pieces of, a song. Can’t tell you a lot about the assignments at this point – I’ve done the first one (which is due Monday), but the peer grading process (which is how the grading works) doesn’t start until Monday, so that part is still a little unclear. As was the assignment – more on that in a minute. The first week the topic was “the journey of the song,” and it was about things like the motives in a song (who is talking, to whom, and why), and point of view – the four different points of view (third, first, or second person narrative, or direct address) from which a song could be written. We then moved on to the idea of building a song – keeping the audience interested by having some development in the song (which could be across time or across perspective), and learned to think of a song as moving across three boxes, each of which introduces new information, which keeps the song interesting, and develops the central idea so that it adds depth (or weight) as it moves across the song. (And also the idea that we’re supposed to involve our “six best friends” – who, what, where, when, why and how – in this development.) That then involved looking at the different parts of a song – verse, chorus, bridge, etc. – and what they’re each supposed to be accomplishing, and the structure of a song created by which of those you have in which orders. Along the way we had quizzes on all of these things, and I was doing great initially (100% on each of the first three), though I got one wrong on the fourth because what I would have called a chorus he called a refrain (and he’d never actually defined what the differences were between them). The quizzes are cool; for the most part they involve listening to a set of songs and identifying our concepts in them (e.g. what is the song structure, or what’s the point of view, in this song). They’re not easy – I’ve had to think hard on some of them. And he’s chosen good songs, both ones I know and ones I don’t and that are quite different from each other. But they’re probably closer to my style of music than to others, which works well for me. So far I’m enjoying the course. I haven’t had any real “aha” moments or learned anything completely new, but it’s giving me perspective on some things I might not have paid as much attention to as I should (or did so implicitly rather than explicitly). Looking ahead even to this week (new material is available in Fridays), I think there are things coming that I haven’t ever thought about, so that will be handy. Pat is a quirky teacher. He’s created some extremely weird scenarios (the biggest one being the story of a plain girl eventually getting married) that I initially shook my head at but probably make these concepts FAR more memorable than they would otherwise be. (This 10-minute story all led to the importance and role of the chorus.) And I think he has a drier sense of humor than some people are probably giving him credit for – he says some things that sound clueless if you were to take them at face value, but I think he’s kidding when he says them. SOME things he explains extremely clearly, but other things he doesn’t explain at all (hence my refrain/chorus problem on the quiz, and he never explained what a pre-chorus was but there it was on one of the quizzes). And nowhere is that more true than in the assignment, where we had to pick a title and sketch out the development of song idea. But no one quite seemed to understand what info we were supposed to give or how we were supposed to input it into the three boxes we were given. Still, it’s interesting. And it’s probably a good thing that there are time limits on taking the quizzes and doing the assignments, because it makes me make time for it, instead of thinking it’ll be around whenever I want to look at it, and so never getting to it. Expect more updates on future weeks/elements of the course.