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 ...

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 ...

Give your chord progressions colour and flair by introducing a handful of ‘out of key’ notes. We’ve previously looked at diatonic chords, ie, chords belonging to a scale or key. As their name suggests ...

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, ...

It's very simple to join one chord to the next in the context of a chord progression, and one of the tools in your armoury for achieving a polished musical effect is to use what we call, 'inverted ...

To celebrate the 30th anniversary issue of American Songwriter (Jan/Feb 2015), “Measure for Measure” served up a smorgasbord of 30 handpicked, solid gold chord progressions. This e-book supplements ...