The 5 Most Powerful Songwriting Exercises...Revealed! (Udemy.com)
Level up your songwriting with five radically practical exercises used by professional songwriters around the world
Created by: How To Write Songs
Last updated March 2023
What you will 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
How it compares
Against the other 270 rated Udemy courses in Music on CourseDuck:
- Rating4.8 out of 5higher than 84% of them
- Reviews206#132 of 271 by number of reviews
- Length3 hoursshorter than 54% of them
- Last updatedMarch 2023earlier than 53% of them
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.
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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
Instructor Details
- 4.8 Rating
206 Reviews
How To Write Songs
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.
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Reviews
By Michelle Valentin Peterson on 10/25/2023
If I hadn't seen so much of this content already on YouTube I would have given it 5 stars. But more than half, for me, was review. Still the content is amazing and I have yet to find other songwriting instructors providing this high level of useful advice, guidance, and information.
By Pauline Thiele on 5/30/2023
When I was 17 years old, I was involved in a motor car accident. It took away my ability to use my left hand to pay the piano or the flute, but more so, the hit on the head took away my ability to follow a tune. But, over the years, I have learnt to follow a tune again, as well as, being blessed with the ability to write powerful words. Mostly I write poetry, but learning about meter and the 'tonic' has been great fun. Thanks for the lelssons.
By Kevin Chan on 5/6/2023
I really enjoyed this course. The exercises were all interesting, and explained in a way that made them clear and digestible. The content was exactly what I needed at my present stage of learning songwriting. I now have lots of fresh ideas to apply to try to improve my writing. Thank you for this course!
By Brendan Robb on 3/16/2023
really good content, I understand why you couldn't but it would have been much better to have the song examples simply play inside the course itself rather than having to download the PDFs and click on the links separately.
By Chevy van Dorssen on 3/2/2023
I have done a few of Keppie and Benny's courses now, and each time I am surprised by how much more I learn and how many elements there are to songwriting. They are a joy to learn from and I'll be watching their content multiple times so all of it sinks in and becomes second nature! Thank guys for another brilliant course :)
By Gabriel Portocarrero Gonzalez on 3/1/2023
A clear, informative and inspiring course to undertake for anyone with an interest in honing their songwriting. Keppie and Ben have taken great care to include relevant and engaging info and exercises that keep you coming back to the page, and push you to experiment with new methods that can get you out of your own head. Great stuff!
By Garry McCandless on 2/23/2023
This is like one of those classes in high school or college that you actually look forward to going to because you like the teacher and they’re explaining things in a way you can follow and that make you think, “Hey, I can actually USE that!” In this course, Keppie and Benny teach specific things you can do on a daily basis to write better songs, songs that listeners will find more interesting, more impactful and more memorable. If you’re already writing songs but want to get better, this is a class that can help you do that.
By Gillian B. on 2/23/2023
Keppie and Ben are back with another winner. This is an amazingly rich course, useful for beginning songwriters but also for people with a good deal of experience. Each of the five lessons introduces a powerful element to add to your songwriting toolbox. The lessons include clear, direct explanations, well-chosen examples, and thoughtfully designed exercises to get you writing rather than just watching. Definitely worth going through more than once, it is so packed with information and wisdom. All delivered with excellent pacing and genuine friendliness. Highly recced!
By Willa Fan on 2/19/2023
Keppie and Benny's passion and love for songwriting is exemplified through their teaching. Their song examples clarify the concepts that they teach and I definitely feel like I am able to build a more solid toolset for my own songwriting. For me, the information on phrasing is particularly helpful and gives me a path to work through my own songwriting challenges. I'll definitely keep this course handy for referencing back in the future!
By Steven Frazier on 2/15/2023
If you are a songwriter looking for to expand your tools so you can write even better songs, then this course if for you! Whether you are a beginner or a pro, there is something that will inspire you to do something you would not have done otherwise. Ben and Keppie are your new favorite songwriting teachers!
Quality Score
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Overall Score : 96 / 100





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