About Pat's Online Courses
Coursera: Writing The Lyrics
1.5 million students (and counting!) have taken this course!
The course will start by examining the tools available to you, all revolving around the essential concept of prosody. You’ll learn to use your tools to enhance your message—to work compositionally at the same time you’re developing your ideas.
You’ll be working both lyrically and musically, though musically it’s not necessary that you either read music or play an instrument. If you play, great, and you’ll be encouraged to play and record your musical responses to the assignments. If you don’t play, the course offers you a number of musical loops to work with. All you’ll have to do is sing your melodies over the loops.
Assignments will ask you to post something for peer review—sometimes lyric lines or sections, sometimes melodies, sometimes both. None of it has to be polished. The course is about writing, not performing.
Creative Writing: Finding Your Voice
Creative Writing: Finding Your Voice is designed to help you write clearly and strongly in your own unique voice, bringing your full self to your writing process every time you write. This course will guide you through the first and most essential part of finding your writing voice: how to bring your senses and sense memories to the forefront and channel them into your writing. No one has ever seen the world from your perspective before, in the order, time, and context you’ve experienced it. Your sense memories stimulate your readers’ imagination, forcing them to respond with their own sense memories, filling your words with their stuff.
Creative Writing: Poetry
Creative Writing: Poetry is a course for writers, songwriters, poets, and anyone who wants to write more effectively. The course will give you specific tools to help you craft and control your writing. You will be taken through a step-by-step process, each step handing you another tool to give what you say more power. You'll learn how to enhance your ideas through arranging lines into odd or even numbered line groups and creating either a feeling of tension or resolution with the composition itself, independent of the poem's meaning. You'll learn placement, timing, focus, and especially how to use rhythm in language expressively.
Register for Creative Writing: Poetry
Lyric Writing: Tools & Strategies
In Tools and Strategies, you'll sharpen your songwriting skills with tools and techniques that have helped Pat's students win Grammys and write number one songs. You'll learn how to generate better ideas, find the right words to express those ideas, and organize rhythms and rhymes into compelling verses, choruses, and bridges.
Register for Tools and Strategies
Lyric Writing: Writing From the Title
In Writing From the Title, you will learn how the professionals approach the construction of songs: by writing from a central idea (the title). Starting with a powerful and effective song title, you'll learn to build complete lyrics from that title, explore how to set the title to the appropriate rhythm and tempo, and to place that title in the song's different sections to create the most powerful impact.
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Lyric Writing: Writing Lyrics to Music
In Writing Lyrics to Music, you'll analyze a variety of song forms to learn about key lyrical and melodic components: stressed and unstressed beats, rhyme positions, melodic sections, and tone. You'll work through different musical feels and time signatures, and discover how the natural shapes of the words follow the shape of the melody, ultimately creating a much more expressive composition.
Register for Writing Lyrics to Music
If you are interested in more in-depth learning, Pat's courses can be taken as part of one of these Certificate Programs. Focus your studies and become a better musician with a Master, Professional or Specialist Certificate Program.
Master Certificate: Songwriting
Master Certificate: Songwriting and Guitar
Professional Certificate: Singer-Songwriter
Specialist Certificate: Creative Writing for Musicians
Try Berklee Online for free!
Wondering what a Berklee online course is like? Try a sample course for free. You'll see:
Berklee's award-winning course content
Instructional video on note fingerings
Audio recordings in posted assignments
Real feedback on student work
Click here to register for a free demo course.
Or try a free sample lesson at Berklee Shares. These are free music lessons that you can download, share and trade with your friends and fellow musicians.