BA (Hons) Songwriting & Production Bachelor's degree at Institute of Contemporary Music Performance

Observe, reflect on and challenge your writing process, gaining the knowledge and skills you need to be a successful songwriter. Working both alone and collaboratively, you'll create a portfolio of original songs, as you explore the historical, cultural, political and social aspects of songwriting through a variety of analytical and hands-on practices.

Build on your comprehension from the previous Creative Songwriting module and develop, edit and complete a portfolio of original songs. You'll apply foundational songcraft elements to your work, using research from a range of social, cultural, political and historical backgrounds to back it up.

Foundation in music theory to help grow your music literacy and confidence. As you progress, you'll develop your aural recognition to understand new compositions and performance works. You'll be introduced to a range of core instruments and uncover a variety of ensemble contexts.

Gain an in-depth and practical understanding of the music industry. As you develop your portfolio career as a songwriter, musician and producer, you'll understand the wider creative industries and the importance of concepts such as copyright. You'll explore the three main areas of modern music – recorded music, live music and music publishing.

Study music programming and production techniques, such as synthesis and sampling, using industry-standard digital audio workstations (DAWs), while developing your critical listening skills. You'll investigate the wide range of methodologies and techniques used by different artists and producers.

Building on the skills and knowledge learned in the Digital Music Production module, you'll return to the studio to investigate digital audio workstation (DAW) in-the-box (ITB) mixing techniques in more detail. By the end of this module, you'll be adept at using a range of professional music production hardware.

Help you to start contextualising your art according to professional songwriting practice norms and standards, as you create new music and develop your technical comprehension of songcraft across different creative environments and projects.

Extend the technical experience and understanding gained in the previous Applied Songwriting module to create a body of creative work that achieves a set of measured outcomes. You'll incorporate different practices, methods and approaches into your creative process.

Learn essential marketing principles, foundational marketing theories and modern marketing approaches. You'll explore how the ever-evolving marketing industry has created both opportunities and challenges for creatives, and how marketing is changing to meet the fluctuating demands of musicians.

Further develop the skills required to work with industry-standard DAWs such as Ableton Live, expanding your knowledge from the first-year Digital Music Production module. You'll learn how to use software as an instrument, as you explore a range of advanced methodologies and techniques used by established producers.

Further develop your mixing and studio skills across this highly technical module. You'll take a deep dive into the mixing process from an artistic and creative context. Comparing commercial mixes will be a huge focus of this module.

Mostly take place in ICMP's high-tech recording studios, where you'll further build your production and recording abilities while discovering the fundamentals of audio recording theory. You'll explore advanced music production techniques for mixing and recording music.

Using your excellent ability to create songs, you'll conceive, plan, develop and manage an impressive songwriting portfolio across this highly creative module. Undertaking detailed research, you'll design and create a unified repertoire of original music.

Help you build your professional and academic skills, predominantly for the preparation, implementation and evaluation of a major musical project. You'll develop practical and conceptual knowledge of the issues, codes and conventions used when creating musical projects.

Pitch a business proposal in a real-life setting to a potential investor, gaining a solid working knowledge of entrepreneurial thinking and business strategies. You'll discover what it means to be 'enterprising' across the modern creative industries.