The Craft of Songwriting – Music Meaning and Emotion | Learn Melody Harmony and Lyrics | Berklee Guide with Online Audio | Essential Songwriting Book for Musicians

This book is more than interesting and can be very helpful to songwriters at most musical levels. It's clearly written and covers a lot of material.However, if you don't have a background in basic music theory (preferably contemporary music theory), you might have a difficult time understanding some of the material.The songwriting techniques put to use things you may have already learned in counterpoint and harmonic analysis classes as well. These concepts are put to use in this book and so are nicely useful. But as previously mentioned, if you're not familiar with basic contemporary music theory...I personally find the original examples rather drab. I think that the author could have done much better with them. Additionally, where she includes known songs as examples of what she's writing about, she only throws out the name of the song and artist. I would have preferred that she delineate where and how those songs do what she is teaching. Instead, if you're interested in listening to those songs, you'll have to listen carefully for things like diminished 7th chords, pivot chords and other modulations, to name a few. So if you're not yet at a level where you can recognize things like that, those examples will be lost to you.My recommendation is to "take a look inside" before purchasing. This is a good book for beginning or stuck songwriters who have a decent contemporary music education and feel comfortable with the lingo.

This book helped my songwriting a lot! I used the lessons in it to improve my melody writing and to overcome boring chord progressions. It's the text for Songwrting: Writing the Music (Berklee College) on coursera.org.

The kindle edition does not come with a code for the audio download, so that benefit is denied the Kindle users, which is a major attribute for a book dealing with music.

I love the way the author helps the reader feel the emotion in the chords.

The Kindle version of this book is essentially just a photograph of each page, making the book useless on most platforms except maybe a large-screen tablet or computer monitor.The Kindle version is basically useless on a normal Kindle Paperwhite or iPhone. Very disappointing.Publishers should not sell such terrible Kindle transfers without warning you that the format they provide will be useless on most Kindle platforms.

What I love about The Craft of Songwriting is the connection Keys makes between musical choices and emotional context. It's a great book that combines theory with feeling, and gives you all the tools you need as a writer to make a tangible impact on your listener.

Haven't gotten the download code for audio.

So far a very nice read. I often find it hard to find melodies for lyrics. I can write lyrics and compose music but this book has helped me in writing music for lyrics.

I really rate this book. Simple explanations, good examples backed up by on line sound files. Quite a thorough treatment of melody/prosody and a good grounding in harmony concepts. Strongly recommend.

Very disappointed. I was looking forward to learning from this book having read others in the Berklee series, but having purchased it from my kindle for reading on my kindle, it appears to be totally incompatible. Sadly, I will be seeking a refund.

Es muy buen libro, está muy bien explicado y tiene ejemplos de audio que se pueden acceder en línea.