Complete Songwriting Course: Chords, Melodies & Lyrics

Explore the building blocks of songwriting by breaking down top line melodies and lyrics, chords and chord progressions, and the bass baseline.

Explore the key song sections and structure, including intro, verse, chorus, bridge, middle eight, instrumental solos, interludes, and outro, to understand how repetition and contrast shape a song.

Explore three songwriting tools, focusing on the song cycle and the impact of memorable titles as billboards, plus how melodic and lyrical hooks anchor choruses and refrains.

Analyze songs to understand melody, chord progression, rhythm, structure, and dynamics that evoke emotion, then apply patterns to your own songs through active listening.

Map song structure using lettered sections (a, b, c) to show how verses, choruses, and bridges fit together. Explore forms like ab, abba, aba, and abab, plus refrains and outros.

Discover how relative major and minor keys share the same notes, move three notes down to find the relative minor, and craft melodies and chords with distinct moods.

Demonstrates major and minor key song progressions using a card-based map, revealing how chords move from the home card to create tension, with verse and chorus examples.

Learn to craft memorable chord progressions by sequencing chords as emotional story beats, using major and minor key roles, motion rules, tension and release, and practical guidelines.

Explore common core chord progressions in C major, including I-IV-V, I-V-IV, I-V-vi-IV, I-vi-IV-V, I-vi-ii-V, and I-V-vi-iii-IV, with guitar demos and pop song examples.

Explore how rhythm shapes song progression, using simple guitar or piano patterns, listening to favorite tracks, and experimenting openly to match your chords and melodies.

Practice the fundamentals of chord progressions in any key using the provided tools and framework, apply rules thoughtfully, and trust your ears to balance theory with feel in your songs.

Explore writing a melody with its four fundamental parts. Understand range, intervals, structure, and scale, and how ascent or descent shapes emotion, major and minor scales, A/B sections, and call-and-response.

Explore how rhyming schemes structure lyric writing by mapping end rhymes with labeled patterns A, B, C and practicing forms like AAA, alternate, and triple x to shape rhythm.

Explore how verses, chorus, bridge, and outro shape a song's structure and emotion, using real examples to illustrate structure and lyrical hooks.

Craft a full song lyric set using a structured exercise: brainstorm, timeline, and write verse, chorus, bridge, and outro about loving someone who leaves town with prescribed rhymes.

Learn to write a full song by selecting a structure and key, crafting progressions, melodies, and lyrics, then layering intro, verses, chorus, bridge, and double chorus with eight-bar sections.

Choose the song key by mood—major for a happy sound or minor for a melancholy tone—and adjust it to fit your vocal range if the melody sits too high.

Write your melodies by improvising over chord progressions, shaping verses, chorus, and bridge with repetition and variation. Use random words and card-inspired notes to craft melodic hooks.

Learn to choose a title that signals the song's message with a memorable lyric hook, often repeated in the chorus, and polish the song for coherence.

Learn to perform your complete song by aligning vocal melodies with instrumental lines, avoid clashes, and record the full version before layering melodies on other instruments; less is more.