Songwriting with Pat Pattison by Berklee College of Music

[Music] hi I'm Pat Patterson I'm a professor at Berkeley College of Music in Boston I've been here for about 38 years now it's a place where you can learn how to write songs place where people like John Mayor and Gillian Welch learned the tools that they're using now to set the bar in their various gen I've also written five courses for Berkeley music which is the online version of uh of Berkeley College of Music the online arm for continuing education now in the course that uh uh we're looking at here we're going to be looking at what it takes to write a song we're going to start uh start at the at at the beginning and the beginning isn't at the beginning of the song the beginning is at the kind of Concepts that uh that you walk into the process with now I don't think that Aristotle ever wrote a song although he may have I mean who knows but I do know that Aristotle did say something that helps not only all songwriters everywhere but helps art in general he said that every great work of art displays the same quality and he called that quality Unity that everything fits together everything works together why to communicate the main point to communicate the idea that you're trying to uh trying to express and so that that that whole concept of unity that everything fits is just common sense and as far as I can tell it is the only possible rule in songwriting other than that rule all we have are a whole belt of tools and those tools are then used in order to create the song in order to make sure that everything is working together now that concept of unity probably uh the best word for it now uh rather than Unity is the word Pro that's spelled p r oos o d y Pro and it essentially means everything works together everything fits together whatever it is that you have in front of you needs to line up in support of whatever idea it is that you're trying to work so what are the tools that we have to look at well there's a lot of them obviously a song is music and words so we have the music which has a number of things that we have to deal with first of all we have to deal with obviously Melody we have to deal with the chords and then let's let's call it the structure or the form how it's put together uh in the lyric we also have uh the words but then we have all of the elements that uh uh that that make up phrases make up verses make up songs so that uh we have we have with uh uh with with the words we have structure again and then we have you know meaning and we have metaphor and point of view all of the various elements that uh connect with the words the point is to put those two together so that major match of Words and Music really is a combination of all sorts of little matches and then we're talking about Pro and that's the fun stuff that's where we're going to start really digging in and having a fabulous time [Music]