Level up your songwriting with five radically practical exercises used by professional songwriters around the world
Concise, digestible, and radically practical!
What you’ll learn
- Five practical exercises that will absolutely make you a better songwriter.
- How to create bangin’ Choruses with simple chord combinations.
- How to draw people in with powerful and inspiring lyrics.
- How to write memorable melodies.
- How to avoid lyric writing cliches.
- Ways to develop strong songwriting habits that will drastically improve your creative flow and output.
- Live demonstrations and detailed breakdowns of professional songwriting techniques.
- Practical applications and examples of each method.
Course Content
- EXERCISE 1 – SENSE WRITING –> 8 lectures • 58min.
- EXERCISE 2 – LANDING THE CHORUS –> 5 lectures • 26min.
- EXERCISE 3: RHYME SCHEMES –> 5 lectures • 27min.
- EXERCISE 4: SONG FORM BLUEPRINTS –> 4 lectures • 41min.
- EXERCISE 5: MELODIC TIMING –> 5 lectures • 25min.
Requirements
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.
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KIND WORDS FROM UDEMY STUDENTS:
Amazing course! Keppie and Benny present this info really well and I found the content extremely helpful for my own song writing journey. I want more!!
—Jasmine
This is a remarkable course. It’s short and efficient, but never feels rushed, and in its short span Keppie and Benny show two completely different methods for writing a song, start to finish, with plenty of detail and illustrations, and step-by-step instructions for what you should do as you go along. Incredibly helpful and illuminating!
—Gillian B.
Fantastic course 🙂 I found your YouTube channel first and I just really like the way you structure your tutorials, it’s basically a conversation, easy to follow with lots of practical tips. I’m a beginner, but I think that you could also get a lot out of this as a more advanced songwriter.
—Xenia Thiem
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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.
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Keppie and Benny have delved into the inmost workings of songwriting. How To Write Songs expertly outlines the essential tools, structural ideas, use of harmonic components and lyrical development that are sure to inspire and educate even the most experienced songwriters. Highly recommend to any and all songwriters.
—Dylan Lachmund
If you are a songwriter looking to benefit from the knowledge of some seasoned songwriters, this is for you. Whether you are a beginner or someone who has been at it for a while, you should take both of Keppie and Ben’s Udemy courses so you can take your songwriting to the next level. Do yourself a favor, and find some inspiration for your next great song(s)!
—Steven Frazier
Keppie and Benny work so well together to deliver a thoroughly engaging step by step process to writing songs. They are clearly both wonderful musicians, as well as great educators, and the way they bounce off each other works so well. I’ve really enjoyed the process and will enjoy going back over the content as I keep working on writing songs. Thanks so much Keppie and Benny, love your work!!
—Justin Davies
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Your Teachers – Industry Experts
Keppie and Benny are working professional songwriters, and both teach contemporary songwriting in some of the world’s most renowned colleges and universities. They are also the founders of the popular ‘How to Write Songs’ YouTube Channel, with a hell-bent mission to help people become better songwriters.
Keppie has taught songwriting at the Berklee College of Music, for Berklee Online, the Australian College of the Arts, the Open Academy at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, as well as at the Songwriting School of Los Angeles. Ben has taught for the JMC Academy and the Australian Institute of Music.
As working songwriters, Keppie has written and co-written songs that have had over 10 million streams in the past 2 years with bands and artists as diverse as ARIA-nominated Twelve Foot Ninja (heavy metal) and Universal Music songwriter Skye. Keppie’s songs appear in major network television shows, and most recently, Keppie was commissioned by Penguin Random House to write one of the first full albums of original work to appear in a major audiobook release (Mothertongues, 2022).
Keppie’s “voice is beautiful, just gorgeous. She’s like a contemporary female Nick Drake…and her guitar playing is so beautiful, so raw…” —John Mayer
“Coutts’ songs marry soul and folk so gorgeously, you’ll cheer when they get stuck on endless repeat on the jukebox in your brain.” —The Boston Globe
Ben Romalis has composed music for large companies such as Adobe and Cathay Pacific, and also composes music for games, televisions and advertising. As a songwriter, he is a founding member of the internationally touring alt-country band, The Green Mohair Suits, which has released 4 studio albums to date. Ben is the founder and head producer at Silamor Studios, a boutique studio specializing in video and audio production.
“Green Mohair Suits make music for pleasure. Our pleasure. If you don’t find yourself smiling, tapping or joining in on one of those harmonies, you’re leading a very sad life.” —Sydney Morning Herald
Ben lectures across a range of subjects including Songwriting, Production and Composition for Screen. He has vast experience designing and delivering workshops on creativity and innovation, as well as mentoring and coaching other industry professionals to help them realise their potential.