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Comment by tagawa | Hacker News Reader

It's not technical but the best I've taken so far is Songwriting on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/songwriting

Presented by Pat Pattison from Berklee College of Music, I started the course thinking who is this guy? By the end I was hanging off his every word. Even if you've never thought of writing a song it opens your eyes to the talent (and tricks!) in the music business.

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Seconded. I too was hanging off his every word, and learned from this course that Roget's Thesaurus is arranged in a completely different way to a regular thesaurus (by category/association rather than alphabetically) [1], and so much about how a good song is structured.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roget%27s_Thesaurus

I took the "Developing your Musicianship" and "Jazz Improvisation" courses, which I believe are in the same specialisation. The first one was at a very basic level and the improv was one was more advanced, but both were excellent. Highly recommended for aspiring musicians.

Good to hear a recommendation for the Songwriting course, thanks, I'll check it out.

I also started Songwriting and Jazz Improvisation, and while both had outstanding content and instruction, the peer-grading of assignments was a complete failure and forced me to quit the coursework timeline. Aside from reviewing others' work being a huge time sink, all feedback I ever got myself was completely useless, like "You did everything in the instructions, but I don't like this" or "Gee, I don't know enough to tell you how to do this any better." I would have gladly paid to get qualified feedback.

You're right, I should have mentioned that, as I actually had a similar experience. A lot of the comments I received were also along the lines of "that's great" (when I knew it wasn't and I was actually looking forward to some constructive criticism from someone better than me) or, as you mentioned, the classic "I don't know enough to help you".

Paying for qualified feedback would have made it better, although I still felt like I took a lot away from the taught content.

I'm doing this one right now, along with his book Writing Better Lyrics, it's great :)

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