A good chord progression has a sense of direction. It doesn’t just wander about, one nice chord following another nice one. Once a progression starts, it’s usually the case that it targets a particular chord, making that one chord more “important”, so to speak, than the others. You see this targeting of that one important […]
If you like starting songs by working out the chord progressions first, you may be aware of one notable difficulty: melodies can sometimes get neglected. And that’s a problem, since the melody is the part that you hope your listeners will be humming. But there are ways to make sure that the chords-first songwriting process […]
Most songs in the pop genres use simple chord progressions. “Simple” means that they target the tonic chord — the chord that represents the song’s key — and make that tonic chord sound like “home.” These sorts of progressions: C-F-G7-C (I-IV-V7-I) C-Am-Dm-G-C (I-vi-ii-V-I) C-Dm-G-C (I-ii-V-I) These are all in the key of C major, and […]
If you’re a chords-first songwriter, sometimes all you’re really needing are some chord progression suggestions that you can experiment with. Once you’ve got chords that you like, it frees you up to move to other more important aspects of a song, like lyrics and melody. If you like the chords-first songwriting process, you’ll want to […]
If you’re a songwriter who favours the chords-first process, you’re used to doing a fair bit of improvising and experimenting, coming up with chord combinations that sound good. In the improvising that you do, you’re possibly (or even probably) not aware of key. In other words, it’s quite possible to generate interesting chord progressions even if […]
If you like the sound of a minor verse moving to a major chorus, you’re in good company. Many songs move from minor to major. That natural “brightening” of the sound just seems to work really well. To hear this in action, you might listen to Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors”, or […]
