Columbia Classes Come Together to Write and Produce Songs at Industry-Level Pace
isiting Instructor Michelle Leonard gathers with students for a listening sessions of songs written, recorded, and mixed by Columbia students. 
Students at Columbia College Chicago collaborated with songwriting pro Michelle Leonard, an instructor at Popakademie in Germany whose work has been featured on television series such as “Adolescence,” “Riverdale,” and “Wolfwalkers."While some Columbia College Chicago students relax on their winter breaks in January, others dive into their creative passions by taking classes during the mini-semester known as J-term.
This year, students from two J-term classes — immersion classes in songwriting and audio — came together to make music magic by writing, performing, mixing, and producing 12 demos of songs in just one week.
“It’s professional training inside a class structure,” says Bill Boris, professor and associate director of the School of Audio and Music. “Students respond to a charge to write and record demos in a really short time, and it’s done in a collaborative way that mirrors the professional world.”
Songwriting Pro Leads the Way
While it’s the first time these two classes have collaborated, it wasn’t the first rodeo for the songwriting immersion class. Visiting instructor and multiplatinum songwriter, Michelle Leonard, has travelled from Germany to teach this class at Columbia for more than a decade.
Leonard is a music industry pro, having written and released songs with artists such as AURORA, Nico Santos, Robin Schulz, Alice Merton, Sigrid, Jacob Collier, and Guy Sebastian. Her work has been featured in international television series such as “Adolescence,” “Riverdale,” “Wolfwalkers,” “Teen Wolf,” and “Hanna,” as well as global advertising campaigns for brands including UNICEF, Rolex, Ford, and Jeep.
Her visit is part of a long-running collaboration between Columbia and Popakademie Baden-Württemberg, University of Popular Music and Music Business in Mannheim, Germany. The partnership includes student exchanges and camps that have promoted professional connections for Columbia students and alums for years.
For both the songwriting and the audio classes, Leonard worked closely with Columbia faculty members of the School of Audio and Music, including Boris; Kelci Kosin, practitioner in residence; Dan Dietrich, assistant professor of instruction; and Adjunct Professor Andre Daniels and Nick Tremulis, former adjunct professor.
How It Worked
In the songwriting class, Kosin and Boris assigned students to teams based on their skill sets and talents. Singer-songwriters Daniels and Tremulis were on hand to help guide students in writing their songs with Leonard.Leonard gave each team professional briefs like those Leonard receives from major labels and publishers.
“Briefs are when you get asked for songs from the industry, and they give you examples of the songs, what they need, and what they’re looking for,” Leonard says.
This year’s briefs pushed students into new terrain.
“We had a lot of J-pop, K-pop briefs,” Leonard says. “So, it was a bit of a challenge for students not as familiar with these genres.”
Even with the pressure, Leonard loved watching the moment students realized they could do it.
“It didn’t take long for them to see what they could accomplish,” she says.
Once students wrote their songs, Leonard worked with them to address the business side of songwriting, with songwriting teams filling out split sheets to determine each contributor’s share of the song’s rights (and possibly dollars if the song sells).
“It’s really great after a session to sit down together and ask: How are we going to divide the rights of the song between us?” Leonard says.
Bringing in the Sound Engineers
For the first time, the songwriting class worked in concert with an audio immersion course taught by Dan Dietrich, bringing student sound engineers into the workflow.
The audio students paired with songwriting groups to get as much information as they could to help them prepare to record and mix the songs in Columbia’s recording studios in two days.
As songwriters took advantage of using their laptops to create many of the instrumental tracks, audio students focused mainly on recording and mixing the vocals that were performed by members of the songwriting teams.
“The groups worked out everything themselves,” Dietrich says. “They just started working together and it happened naturally.”
The End Results: 12 Polished Demos
In the end, the output impressed everyone involved.
“Now we have 12 polished demos, and they’re ready to pitch to labels,” Leonard says.
While students walk away from both classes with something incredibly tangible, Leonard believes there’s an even bigger takeaway from the immersion courses.
“I think the most important thing is that they’re proud of themselves,” she says. “And now they realize that they have it in them.”
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