The 5 Most Powerful Songwriting Exercises… Revealed!
Level up your songwriting with five radically practical exercises used by professional songwriters around the world.
What You’ll Learn:
- Five practical exercises that will absolutely make you a better songwriter.
- How to draw people in with powerful and inspiring lyrics.
- How to avoid lyric writing cliches.
- Live demonstrations and detailed breakdowns of professional songwriting techniques.
- How to create bangin’ Choruses with simple chord combinations.
- How to write memorable melodies.
- Ways to develop strong songwriting habits that will drastically improve your creative flow and output.
- Practical applications and examples of each method.
Who is this for?
- Songwriters of any level looking for new exercises, techniques, and processes to inspire their songwriting.
- People looking for concise, digestible, and immediately practical tips.
- People who want to learn from professional songwriters who are also experienced teachers.
- Songwriters who love learning and acquiring new skills.
- People who have never written a song and want to know how to start.
Requirements:
- No experience needed, just a keen desire to write songs and an open mind to try new things.
Testimonials
Course Description:
Concise, digestible, and radically practical!
Like you, we love learning new things and acquiring new skills to get us closer to our vision for our music — but we don’t love long-winded courses, padded out with information that we will probably never need or use. Those courses can be overwhelming, and end up half-finished, and make us feel worse than when we started.
This course is a powerful distillation of our collective 40 years of songwriting and teaching experience at some of the best colleges and universities in the world – the 5 most powerful and practical exercises to help you transform your songwriting—immediately.
These 5 exercises will give you the tools, techniques, and processes that will help you turn your ideas into powerful musical storytelling – songs that move people to tears, laughter, and love.
Learning these exercises changed our lives – and has led to fulfilling (and rewarding!) careers as songwriters.
We’re thrilled to share with you the 5 most powerful songwriting exercise to transform your songwriting. They changed our lives—we’re sure they’ll change yours too.
In this course, we show you:
- Exercises for generating ideas—and “endless idea generation tool”.
- A writing exercise to draw on to take an idea and develop a full lyric out of it.
- How to write a bangin’ chorus (using a secret, but super simple, chord technique!).
- How to write lyrics like a pro, by avoiding rhyme cliches – we show you 3 different rhyme schemes that will make your lyrics stand out from the crowd.
- An exercise for using great songs as a blueprint for your own songwriting – giving your song structure, and making sure you can finish your song every time.
- A melody exercise that places your most important ideas in neon lights – experimenting with melodic placement so that your melodies and lyrics are in perfect sync with each other.
- Tips on how pro songwriters think about melodic phrasing to create dramatic contrast, sonic spotlighting, and an emotional journey.
Each exercise is radically practical, and immediately actionable.
At each step, we:
- Guide you through step by step.
- Give you real-life examples of the exercise in action.
- Show you how a song idea is transformed by applying these techniques.
- Give you well-known song examples to show how this exercise is evident in gold-star songwriting.
Course Content
Exercise 1: Sense Writing
8 Lectures (58min)
- Why Sense-based Language is So Powerful
- Sense Writing – What is it?
- Sense Writing in Action: Live Demonstration
- Analysis: Identifying the Senses and their Impact
- Practical Applications of Sense Writing – How to Use it in Your Own Songs
- Case Studies: ‘Bed Song’ by Amanda Palmer & ‘The Other’ by Lauv
- Case Study: ‘Nothing’ by Bruno Major
- Action Steps – Make Sense Writing Your Superpower
Exercise 2: Landing the Chorus
5 Lectures (26min)
- The HOME and AWAY Function of Chords in Your Verse
- Variation 1: Avoiding the Tonic in Your Verse
- Variation 2: Using the Tonic in the Verse and Chorus
- Variation 3: Avoiding the Tonic in the Chorus
- Actions Steps: Working Your Lyrics Through 3 Variations
Exercise 3: Rhyme Schemes
5 Lectures (27min)
- What is Rhyme Scheme and How Does It Create Momentum
- Understanding Rhyme Scheme Notation
- Rhyme Scheme #1: aaab cccb
- Rhyme Scheme #2: abba
- Rhyme Scheme #3: Last Line x
Exercise 4: Song Form Blueprints
4 Lectures (41min)
- What is Song From Blueprinting?
- LIVE DEMONSTRATION: Analysis of ‘WAY WITH WORDS’
- LIVE DEMONSTRATION: Analysis of ‘ANOTHER MAP’
- Using Blueprinting to Improve Your Songwriting
Exercise 5: Melodic Timing
5 Lectures (25min)
- The Value of Exploring Different Melodic Timing Options
- Demonstration #1: Lyrical Phrase Moving Through 3 Rhythmic Options
- Demonstration #2: Lyrical Phrase Phrase Moving Through 3 Rhythmic Options
- Demonstration #3: Lyrical Phrase Moved Through 3 Rhythmic Options
- Action Steps & Wrap-Up
Meet the team
Keppie Coutts and Ben Romalis
We are Keppie Coutts and Ben Romalis, two professional songwriters, performing artists and teachers with over 40 years of collective experience in the music industry.
We have studied and taught at some of the best contemporary music colleges in the world including Berklee College of Music, Sydney Conservatorium, the Australian College of the Arts, the Australian Institute of Music, the LA School of Songwriting and JMC Academy.
Our goal is to help people write better songs! Our belief, having worked with thousands of songwriters (many going on to find careers and success in music), is that your songwriting, like all things, can get better with meaningful and deliberate practice. Our intention is to share the skills, knowledge and ideas that we’ve had the privilege of gathering with others who embrace the art and craft of songwriting.
Are you ready to join us?
Self-Paced Online Course
5 Songwriting Exercises
- 3 hours on-demand video
- 18 downloadable resources