Songwriting Workshop

The online summer experience is tailored to your skill level and musical interests. You’ll choose one track of study to pursue from our Berklee Online songwriting courses.

• Collaborative Songwriting: This course will actively engage students in an intensive program of online song collaboration, which will allow them to develop practical and creative real-world skills for professional cowriting.
• Commercial Songwriting Techniques: Learn to write for commercial success by reproducing the time-tested characteristics of hit songs while maintaining your own voice.
• Lyric Writing: Tools and Strategies: Generate more and better ideas. Express them in compelling and original ways.
• Music Production Fundamentals for Songwriters: You don’t have to limit your compositional tools to you and your standby instrument. Technology can offer so many points of entry to make creative ideas become musical realities. This course gives you all you need to learn your way around the latest recording and composing technology. You’ll learn how to use a Digital Audio Workspace (DAW) as a compositional tool, arrange with MIDI, and engineer and produce your own recordings.
• Songwriting: Writing Hit Songs: Learn to make the most effective settings for your melodic, harmonic, and lyrical ideas. Move your listeners and express yourself more effectively by crafting song sections and complete songs the way hit writers do.

Please review the track requirements before selecting your track. 

Additionally, the Songwriting Workshop offers open mic opportunities for students to listen to and connect with each other, visiting artist master classes, and clinics.

If you are interested in receiving a one-on-one mentoring session with a Berklee faculty member, then you may be interetsted in our Songwriting Sessions. 

You'll participate in five or six hours of required coursework per week. You'll have live class sessions with your Berklee instructors and fellow students, along with independent coursework that can be completed on your own schedule. The weekly schedule includes a one hour live class scheduled by your teacher at a time that accommodates you. Classes will meet regularly at defined times, and you are expected to attend each live class if you can. Recordings of all classes will be archived to accommodate students in different time zones or with schedule issues.

You will also be invited to attend an optional weekly master class on Wednesdays from 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. ET which will feature presentations by Berklee faculty, noted alumni, and successful writers and artists. There will be an optional open mic held every other Thursday from 2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. You can sign up to participate in the interactive sessions master classes or play in an open mic in the online learning environment. All other required coursework will take place at the students’ own schedule. 

If you're interested in showcasing your performance skills, open mics will be hosted multiple times a week to offer more experience performing for an audience.   

All students 14 and older with some background in songwriting are welcome to attend.

For this program, you should have access to a computer with the latest version of Google Chrome, a webcam, speakers or headphones, an external or internal microphone, and a broadband internet connection. There may be some additional requirements, depending on your chosen track. Please review the requirements before selecting your track.