Songwriting: Writing the Lyrics vs Songwriting: Writing the Music

Four focused modules move from point of view and song form through prosody (matching lyric to music), rhyme types — perfect, family, assonance and consonance — and rhythm. The object-writing exercise is the standout that Berklee graduates like Gillian Welch credit as the single most valuable thing they took away. Reviewers repeatedly say it taught them more than books or workshops; capped only because it is lyric-focused and assumes you already make music elsewhere.

Pat Pattison is a Berklee professor of 40-plus years, author of Writing Better Lyrics and Songwriting Without Boundaries, and former teacher of John Mayer and Gillian Welch. His Coursera instructor rating is 4.8 from 184 ratings. Learners describe him as a gifted, passionate teacher whose examples make abstract ideas click — the most consistently praised element of the whole course.

Free to audit the full video curriculum; a certificate, graded assignments and peer review require paid enrollment or a Coursera Plus subscription. Reddit's consensus is that the free audit alone delivers most of the value, since you can do the exercises yourself and skip the certificate gate. Hard to beat for a Berklee-grade course.

Assignments are real lyric-writing tasks graded by peer review, which is pedagogically sound but operationally the weakest part. Multiple learners hit an upgrade wall at the first assessment, and the quality of peer feedback swings from genuinely useful to abusive or absent. The exercises themselves are excellent; the grading machinery around them is not.

The tools transfer directly to any genre — songwriters from hip-hop to country report applying object writing, rhyme families and structure to their own work. It will not teach you melody, production or an instrument, so it is one strong piece of a larger toolkit rather than a complete songwriting education.

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.