Most songs are said to be “in a key.” If the key is C major, that C major chord is said to be the tonic chord. A dominant chord is one that is built on the 5th degree of a scale. Dominant chords like to move to tonic chords. That’s why G7-C (V7-I) is so […]
Using a chords-first songwriting method usually means starting out by improvising on chords until something interesting pops into your mind. But one of the drawbacks to this process is that you can waste a lot of time simply trying to find chords that work well together. I’ve placed two charts below, one for major keys and […]
Improvising happens in every genre of music you can name, some genres more than others. A jazz concert will likely feature improvisation as a key element in practically every song. In that case, we usually mean a sax player or guitarist that might take a solo. But improvisation, of course, happens in every sub-genre of pop music, […]
In a sense, all students of anything are self-taught. The best teachers are mainly facilitators, presenting their own particular angle on a topic. Certainly, a teacher can offer you facts and figures that you may not have previously known, but offering facts and figures isn’t teaching. And teachers can help you parse the data, make sense of the tricky bits, […]
Do you find that getting chords to sound right is the hardest part of getting a song working? Chord theory is a topic that takes considerable study to understand it thoroughly, so let’s look at it from a different angle. Here are 7 things about chord progressions that many songwriters don’t know. It may help you […]
Songwriters are correct to think a lot about how to start the songwriting process. How you start often has a strong influence on where things end up. But songwriters typically worry, not so much that they’re starting the wrong way, but more that they’re possibly missing out on a better way. You need to look […]
