Most of the time when you create chord progressions for your songs, you’re using chords that all come from a particular key. Often we combine chords even without knowing what key they come from. Trying to get the chords-first songwriting process working? Your main concern with chords-first songwriting will usually be the creation of good, memorable […]
As you know, I spend a lot of time telling songwriters that their chords don’t need to be complex or even innovative in order for a song to succeed. They just need to support the melody, and as long as that melody is catchy, and assuming the lyrics you come up with are engaging, you’ve […]
In songwriting, a formula amounts to a set of steps that are predictable “responses” to whatever has just happened. And in general, they’re not necessarily desirable. What’s so undesirable about formulas? It comes down to this: most of your listeners like to hear musical ideas that are generated in a spontaneous sort of way, and […]
There’s no particular songwriting principle that says that there needs to be a noticeable connection between the various chord progressions within a song. If you’ve got a song that uses a verse-chorus design, you can use a completely different progression in each section, progressions that have absolutely no obvious similarity. Having said that, there is a benefit […]
If you want to know what key a song is in, it’s typically the chorus you should be looking at. That’s because verse progressions might wander about, making identification of the actual key a bit difficult. But by the time you get to the chorus, things usually become clearer. It’s not unusual, for example, for […]
The notion of the so-called killer chord progression is a bit of a myth that I used to hear songwriters discuss years ago. It’s a myth, not because chord progressions can’t be powerful and epic, but because songs are nearly always about a partnership of many different elements. Trying to get the chords-first songwriting process […]
