It goes without saying that a good chord progression can be fundamental to a quality song, but when you find yourself staring at a blank screen, how do you get started and string an appropriate set of ...

Which comes first: chords or meloody? That's the chicken and egg question facing any music maker staring at a blank DAW screen, and there's no right answer as to which you need to nail first. And ...

In musical terms, a cadence is a short phrase, usually a sequence of two chords, that’s used to ‘punctuate’ a chord progression. In the same way that regular punctuation in a text has commas, full ...

Listen up: scales aren’t just torture devices invented by guitar teachers... When you use a scale, say, C major, you are playing ‘in the key of C’. The word ‘diatonic’ simply means ‘within a key’, so ...

A lot of the elements that make pop music successful relate to it being catchy and familiar. As a songwriter, there are many ways to engender this feeling in listeners, to do with song structure, ...

You may have seen one of the various online videos in which a musician will demonstrate ‘100 songs in 4 minutes’ or ‘play 50 songs with only these 4 chords’ and so on. There is a slight technical flaw ...

You know you're doing something right as a musician when a particular chord or chord progression gets named after you. Take for instance the Hendrix Chord (that's a dominant seven chord with a sharp ...