The Beginner's Guide to Adobe After Effects vs Songwriting: Writing the Music

The course spans 34 video lessons across approximately 5 hours, covering After Effects fundamentals including panels and workspaces, keyframe animation, precomposing, masking, text work, looping animations, and video export. Multiple reviewers praised the "why not just the what" approach — Jake explains the reasoning behind every setting rather than dictating values to copy. One reviewer who completed the Taco Tuesday arcade project noted it gave a clear grip on the basics and strong workflow tips. The main limitation is that the course only covers Skillshare-hosted content and does not update as frequently as After Effects itself evolves.

Jake Bartlett is consistently described as one of the best After Effects educators online — a Denver-based motion designer with over 16 years of professional experience since 2010 and 30+ courses reaching 325,000+ students. Reviewers across independent blogs, his own website testimonials, and the School of Motion interview converge on the same qualities: he eliminates filler, explains principles rather than recipes, and makes complex animation concepts digestible for any skill level. Students from complete beginners to working professionals report learning something new in every lesson.

The course is included in a Skillshare subscription at approximately $13.99/month billed annually — one of the most affordable entry points into structured After Effects education. The subscription unlocks Jake's entire catalog of 30+ courses (Animating With Ease, Shape Layers, Kinetic Type, 3D in After Effects, and more), multiplying the value considerably. Independent reviewers note the annual plan makes Skillshare "incredible value for money" for beginner-to-intermediate creative content, though the subscription model means access ends if you cancel, unlike one-time Udemy purchases.

Jake monitors a Community discussion tab where students can post questions and he responds, and he runs live portfolio review workshops on Skillshare for direct feedback. However, multiple platform-level reviews note that peer feedback on student project submissions is inconsistent — many projects receive no critique. The Skillshare model lacks the structured cohort and Discord community offered by Jake's paid standalone "Launch Into After Effects" course, which includes a private Discord and personal feedback loops.

The Taco Tuesday arcade animation project produces a portfolio-worthy animation covering keyframe timing, precomposing, masking, parenting, and video export — all transferable to real motion design work. Reviewers note that the skills taught match industry workflows, and Jake's professional background ensures techniques reflect actual production practices. One reviewer specifically called out precomposing as a major takeaway that they hadn't properly understood from other resources. The course stops short of intermediate topics like expressions, 3D, and motion paths, which require Jake's follow-on Skillshare courses to continue.

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.