Hi Scott,

I'm glad you've jumped on-board his course. Pat is brilliant. I have an immense respect for him. It's no accident that he's a college professor of poetry and lyric writing. It's also no accident that his students have won Grammys (e.g. John Mayer, Gillian Welch). I've been to 13 or 14 of his weekend seminars and I'll definitely be going again when he comes out here in January 2014.

I have no doubt that Pat will cover melody and harmony in his course. His presentations are often more directly focused on lyrics and melody and harmony tend to happen indirectly.

Personally, I've found that the implications of writing lyrics with attention to all the aspects that Pat teaches have a huge impact on melody and the supporting harmony. These days, I develop my lyrics first and get their movement, and subsequent emotional journey, in place before I play around with music. I've come to find that, for me, getting the lyric rhyme and rhythm organised is the best way I can build the strongest foundation for my song.

Apart from "Writing Better Lyrics" - which I gather from posts is the book he's using for this course - Pat's other two books ...
  • Essential Guide To Lyric Form And Structure
  • Essential Guide To Rhyming

... are also very, very valuable.

In the "Lyric Form And Structure" book, Pat goes into great detail about how to enhance the emotion of a lyric through its musical motion (i.e. line length, spotlight phrases, lyric acceleration and deceleration through rhyme, etc.). He has plenty of exercises to practise in these books, too. I regularly re-read all three books. I've found that there's always something that I pickup with each read that I didn't see the read before!

Last year, a handful of us got together and worked our way through his newest book "Songwriting Without Boundaries". It was 8 weeks of exercises that developed skills I had no idea I possessed! It was a long journey but well worthwhile. I even set up a completely private forum so that we could all do the exercises over the web. It worked very well (If a small group of, say, 10 - 20 people are interested in undertaking this journey after the present course has finished, I'm happy to get the site up and running again. It's all set up.)

Anyway, enjoy the course! It was great of Josie to find this and to share it with everyone.
Noel

MY SONGS...
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