A piano is shown with holiday lights sparkling on the keys and in the background.

How to Write Original Holiday Songs

’Tis the season to spice up your catalog of originals with holiday songwriting tips courtesy of songwriter Brady Rymer, Berklee Online songwriting instructors Andrea Stolpe and Jimmy Kachulis, as well as Berklee’s Joe Bennett, who helped compose what is winkingly known as “the happiest Christmas song, according to science.”

Silly love songs: Two blank cassette tapes made to look like classic mixtapes from the 1980s are positioned together to make the shape of a heart

How to Write a Love Song

The key to a great love song is a specific yet universal message that feels like it’s about you and your special someone. This is how you achieve that.

A woman writing melody on guitar

What is Melody in a Song?

Learn the basics of writing melody with the help of Jack Perricone’s book Melody in Songwriting: Tools and Techniques for Writing Hit Songs.

person writing a song in a notebook

How to Choose a Song Title

As a songwriter, finding a song title is the big question, and the hard one, because a title is only as good as your imagination—your ability to do something interesting with it. Pat Pattison shares how you can make your song titles more interesting.

Song Lyrics Generators: Are They Good for Songwriters?

As a professional songwriter, I was highly suspicious that song lyric generators would be sophisticated enough to generate complete songs. However, this does not render their services completely useless.

3 Lessons H.E.R.’s ‘Hard Place’ can Teach us about Songwriting

Andrea Stolpe walks us through H.E.R.’s song “Hard Place,” and tells us why it’s a great example of prosody, and how you can apply the same principles to your songwriting.

The four members of The 1975 band.

3 Songwriting Lessons from The 1975’s ‘Give Yourself a Try’

Berklee Online instructor and multiplatinum songwriter Andrea Stolpe discusses how to embrace lyrical and melodic ideas that don’t always agree, using the example of the 1975’s song, “Give Yourself a Try.”

Songwriting Imagery

How to Write a Song Using Imagery

Learn how to write a song using imagery in a series of video tutorials by Berklee Online songwriting instructor Andrea Stolpe.

A woman applying critical listening to four different songs.

4 Critical Listening Tips for Songwriters

One of the most important techniques you can learn as a songwriter is how to listen critically. We start by breaking the different components of a song into four large moving parts: Melody, Chords, Lyric, and Groove.

A musician sitting at a piano generating song ideas.

Song Ideas: 20 Tips for Songwriting Inspiration

Berklee Online course author Andrea Stolpe provides 20 tips to help you jumpstart your songwriting process and generate song ideas.