Sometimes people ask me if they can take one of my classes without being enrolled at NYU or the New School. For these people, I have good news: this summer, I will be teaching Songwriter’s Lab, an eight week online songwriting course that I’m collaborating on with the good people at Synthase. I met their founder Nate May a few years ago and we have been mutual admirers ever since, so it’s exciting to be working on this with him and his team.
Here’s a video in which I briefly discuss the class with Huijuan Ling from Synthase.
Songwriter’s Lab is modeled on the Songwriting Workshop, a course I have been teaching at the New School for the past couple of years (it was previously known as the Song Factory). Participants in the Lab will write four original songs using four widely used song forms: a twelve bar blues, a 32-bar AABA tune, a rock/pop verse-chorus song, and a loop-based groove. For each project, we will do some background reading and listen to representative examples. Discussions will cover both technical music aspects of each form and their broader stylistic and cultural context. Then participants will present their completed songs for peer feedback.
Four songs in eight weeks is a lot! Participants will have to work fast and not spend too much time fiddling around. This is by design. The hardest problem in songwriting is not anything technical or creative, it’s overcoming anxiety and option paralysis. Tight deadlines are very helpful for this problem.
No prior musical experience or knowledge is necessary to take the class. If you have been listening to and singing songs your whole life, you probably have significantly more songwriting expertise than you realize. Participants who play instruments or produce can create their own instrumental backing, but folks can also use existing instrumentals, type beats, karaoke tracks and the like. I will talk about production and arrangement to the extent that people want to know about them, but we will be mostly focused on top-line melodies and lyrics.
Online courses have their pros and cons. The main pro is that you can enroll in the class from wherever you happen to be. Not being together in a classroom is a con, but that has a few advantages too. I have had a lot of students struggle with anxiety around presenting their songs, and people can sometimes find it easier not to have everyone in the room with them. Also, Zoom has a nice affordance for presenting music projects: people can discuss a song in the chat window while it’s playing, without disrupting the listening experience. So while I know we are all still scarred from the pandemic, I don’t think the online format should be much of an obstacle.
We’re capping enrollment at 30, so sign up sooner rather than later!