Hi! I’m going to give a brief review of my experience with Berklee Online’s “Arranging: Contemporary Styles” course. I took this course online during the Summer 2020 semester (July - September), and it was taught by Dan Moretti. The course was one of those that come on sale every 3 months, discounted by $300 USD, which ends up coming to the “low” price of $1,700 CAD (non-credit).

My previous experience with Berklee Online was taking 1 course in the Winter 2020 semester (January - March), which was “Arranging for Songwriters: Instrumentation and Production in Songwriting”. (Also discounted, and I had an additional $300 USD discount from completing a Coursera course offered by Berklee).

I’m not a particularly articulate writer, and it’s been over a month since I’ve wrapped up the course, so apologies if it’s too brief for you to pass judgement on the course. I’m writing this review because I don’t see enough reviews from people about courses that aren’t free, so it’s hard for someone to dictate whether or not they’d like to enrol in the course, especially considering the price tag.

Course Description

This course is really all about understanding “grooves” in each genre that I had mentioned above. Each week, 1 genre is covered. (See the Berklee Online page for the course to see which week each genre is covered.) The week consists of:

  • a couple of “slides” of material;
  • some song analyses by the instructor;
  • a handful of examples of the style being studied;
  • “Discussion” tasks (where you answer a question posed by the instructor);
  • Listening quizzes (usually “name that song”);
  • one assignment

The Good

“High-Level” Content

I enrolled in the course initially because it covered styles of music that I am very fond of - funk, soul, hip-hop, motown. I find it difficult to dive into the content of these styles of music, as most courses, YouTube channels, etc. talk about jazz or classical. (Understandable, given their depth). These genres are covered in the second half of the course. The first half of the course is an intro (week 1), a bit on rock music (week 2), and then Afro-Cuban styles for the remaining weeks. I was skeptical of learning about Afro-Cuban styles, but the content was intriguing enough. The common rhythms in these styles have been utilized in many styles of American music. (The clave is the most obvious one.)

Song Analysis

For each week, Prof. Moretti picks one or more tunes in the style for that week and breaks down the “groove” in a 3-5 minute video. The groove is usually just the first 4-8 measures of the song so dedicating that much time to that small of a section allows for a detailed explanation.

The Textbook

The textbook has many examples which is nice, and it comes with audio stems that you can use in your assignments (a maximum of 1 per assignment). It’s also cheap ($40 or so from what I remember).

Assignments

You can get away with stock plugins for almost everything.

You can resubmit assignments when you get a grade lower than an “A” to get a better grade, assuming you actually fixed what was wrong with the assignment.

Also, vocals are not required for each assignment, which is nice.

Midterm

The midterm is a written test you can submit at any time during the course (after it opens) and is effectively free credit.

The Bad

The “Slides”

You can easily get through the slides for each week in a couple of hours at most. The “additional reading material” tends to be Wikipedia links. You’re also required to participate in “discussions” (2-3 a week), which are really just tasks such as:

“Find the original version of “Respect” on YouTube by Otis Redding and compare it to Aretha Franklin’s version. Post your thoughts below. Remember to try to be specific about describing all the qualities of the song—melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre (sound). I look forward to your comments!

Sometimes other students will comment on your discussion answer but that was rare in this offering.

For each style there’s a list of characteristics that are given. Here’s an example:

Basic Instrumentation Basic instrumentation includes drums, fingered electric bass, piano, Hammond B-3 organ, Wurlitzer electric piano or Fender Rhodes, two electric guitars, background vocals, horns, and lead vocals._

Depending on whether the music is more traditional or commercial, the instrumentation varies.

Production Considerations Production considerations include natural sounds, a bottom-heavy (kick and bass) approach, and less reverb for a more traditional approach. More commercial recordings add reverb and change the instrumentation.

Harmony Roots approach would have simpler chords triadic in nature with gospel-type progressions. Depending on the song the harmony can change. Usually progressions are diatonic.

Melody A traditional approach to the melody would relate to gospel hymns; however, depending on the song, the melody can change.

Rhythm Common meters include 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, and 12/8. The shortest rhythm is usually eighth notes, but it can also be sixteenth notes in 4/4 time.

Every week tends to have:

  • “Usually progressions are diatonic”
  • “Depending on the song, the X can change” (harmony, melody, instrumentation)

Pretty revealing stuff.

Assignments

The assignments were underwhelming. Each week, the goal of the assignment was to create a groove in the style of the week. This ends up being 8 bars or so. You’re told which instruments to use (which is helpful). Some of the assignments for the Afro-Cuban styles were literally “copy the groove in the textbook” (to stay true to the style). If you’re already a good musician, you can crank through an assignment in a trivial amount of time. All of my assignments were graded as “A” but they were the bare minimum compared to some other students’ submissions.

In the second half of the course, Prof. Moretti says to make sure to consider the mix in your assignments. However, no guidelines are really given on this front, and by “mix” he really just seems to mean the levels of the instruments. You don’t have to do anything “fancy” like compression, EQ, reverb…

The Textbook

The actual content of the textbook is lacking. Each chapter is a genre with multiple examples. It has a bit of the history on the style, sheet music for each example (awesome!), and then a bullet point list of characteristics of the example. Effectively, each chapter could simply be a blog post, but… ya gotta make more money when ya can, I guess.

The Live Classes

I’m glad there were live classes, I’ll say that much. Prof. Moretti is a nice guy and he’s definitely a talented musician with a boatload of experience. However he tends to ask the same questions every week (“which DAW do each of you use?”) and the content was very beginner level.

The Ugly

Instructor Feedback

If you get an “A” on the assignment then it’s a couple of sentences at most. If you get lower than that, Prof. Moretti will tell you what to do to make it “better” (more true to the style). Additionally, he does not respond to your comments on the “Discussion” tasks.

Compared to “Arranging for Songwriters” (the other course I had taken), this is where the course really fell flat for me. In “Arranging for Songwriters” the instructor (Bonnie Hayes, who is a gem!) responded to every single discussion comment and would leave a 2-5 minute video of feedback for each assignment.

The Berklee Online Platform

The WYSIWYG editor (the text field that you use to submit answers and assignments) is terrible. When pasting from somewhere else, there’s so many formatting issues and you can’t edit your submission (or preview it!) so you have to live with the shame of your poorly formatted answer and then reply to yourself with a better formatted version.

As a web developer, the platform itself is ugly and feels clunky. I remember having a number of UX issues with it but have suppressed them since completing the course so I can’t point out any specific issues at this time.

Final Say

I don’t think I’d recommend taking this course. The textbook has all of the examples used in the course and more, with the same amount of content regarding describing each style. I’d like to say more here but I’m pretty hungry and this was a lot more content than I was expecting to write!