Songwriting: Writing the Music vs Photography Basics and Beyond: From Smartphone to DSLR

The course works through the musical half of songwriting in a focused, practical sequence: diatonic chords in a key, borrowed non-diatonic chords, common progressions and their emotional colour, 7th chords and added tensions, then harmonic and melodic rhythm and melodic hooks. Reviewers and Reddit users describe it as a genuinely useful, concrete walk through how harmony and melody carry emotion — "what the main chords are, simple substitutions, how to add colour, and how those decisions impact the emotion and focus of your song." Capped because it is the music-only companion piece: it assumes you bring lyrics and some theory of your own.

Scarlet Keys is a Professor of Songwriting at Berklee, a former Warner Chappell staff writer with a gold record in Sweden and a UK top-ten hit, and the author of The Craft of Songwriting. On the MOOC, learners find her clear and well-organised. The deduction comes from her wider teaching record: her Rate My Professors profile sits around 3.5/5 across 44 ratings and is polarised — many praise her as knowledgeable, accessible and supportive, while a minority feel she "teaches what she knows best" and is less strong outside her own genres. Strong on the MOOC, more divisive live.

Free to audit the full video curriculum; a certificate, graded assignments and peer review require paid enrollment or a Coursera Plus subscription. The Reddit consensus is to do exactly that — audit it free, work the exercises, and skip the certificate gate. For a Berklee-grade course in melody and harmony aimed squarely at songwriters, the free-audit route is very hard to beat on price.

Assignments ask you to apply chords, progressions and harmonic rhythm to your own song ideas and are assessed by peer review behind the upgrade paywall — pedagogically reasonable but operationally the weakest part, the same machinery that draws complaints across Berklee's Coursera catalogue. The bigger applied limitation is the prerequisite: the most-repeated criticism is that the course "will be frustrating for anyone who does not read music," so the hands-on work assumes notation fluency the marketing underplays.

The harmony and melody tools transfer directly to real writing across genres — Reddit users specifically recommend it to people who can write lyrics but freeze up on chords, and report applying progressions, substitutions and harmonic rhythm to their own songs straight away. It will not teach you production, arrangement or an instrument, and it pairs best with a lyrics course, so it is one strong pillar of a songwriting education rather than the whole building.

Across five courses the fundamentals — exposure, the ISO/shutter/aperture triangle, depth of field, composition, light and basic Lightroom — are taught clearly and at a beginner-friendly pace. Glendinning and Sullivan are repeatedly praised for thoroughness. Capped because several reviewers flag the Lightroom and smartphone sections as dated, and courses 3-4 as padded with off-topic chatter.

Professors Peter Glendinning and Mark Sullivan are the most-cited strength in the first four courses — "thorough", "great advice", "easy to follow". The score is held back by a recurring complaint that the instructors are absent from the discussion forums and never personally critique work, most acutely in the capstone where they "make only token appearances".

Free to audit; ~$49/month subscription for graded assignments and the Michigan State certificate, completable in roughly two to three months. Strong value for a university-backed beginner curriculum. Capped because the capstone month adds little new content for the same monthly fee and a minority called the production quality "not worth the price".

Real shooting assignments, a web gallery and a portfolio-building capstone give learners genuine practice and shareable work. But project quality is bottlenecked by peer grading: many reviewers report superficial one-word critiques, plagiarised submissions, bot accounts and slow turnaround, which undermines the feedback loop the projects depend on.

Multiple learners report going from "knowing nothing" to confident shooting, selling prints, or switching toward photography seriously. The exposure and composition fundamentals transfer directly to any camera. Limited by the absence of business-of-photography content and by post-production teaching that lags current Lightroom versions.