Berklee College Of Music Inc

Bachelor in Arranging for Songwriters: Instrumentation and Production in Songwriting

In this course, you’ll learn new tools to bring your songs to listeners in their most effective and emotional forms, whether in a live setting, recorded song demos, or in produced masters. You’ll broaden your understanding of instrumentation, keeping in mind the idea of prosody, in which all parts of a song work together to create an emotionally resonant whole. You’ll learn to consider which instruments best express the emotion and mood of the song, how groove and dynamics can support that emotion, and how to define the instrumental parts to emphasize the vocal and support lyric narrative. You’ll find new ways to engage listeners’ attention, by always having a musical conversation within the arrangement. You’ll also look at the effects of market and genre on arrangement choices, including ways to bridge the gap between preserving your artistic identity and engaging your listeners.

During this course, you will create arrangements and productions of complete and partial songs, drawing from works you’ve previously written or works written for the course. You’ll learn to listen not only to the song, but to the sound. And you’ll create recordings and arrangements that work considering both the layout of their sections and the treatment of frequency range and volume. You’ll use density and intensity to increase dynamics and momentum.