When I write music, I like starting with melody first. But melody-first writing means also thinking about chords. That’s because the musical part of our brain is always assembling melody notes and coming up with chords. If you want to see how this works, click to listen to this melody: A simple enough melody. Play it […]
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Knowing why some chord progressions your’e coming up with sound good while others just don’t work at all is an entire area of study in music schools. For many of you, though, a good chord progression is something you can come up with by improvising and by borrowing ideas from other existing progressions. In this blog […]
Some songwriters have a natural aversion to music theory. That dislike usually goes hand-in-hand with the mistaken belief that the purpose of music theory is to tell you what you should or shouldn’t be writing. That’s never been the purpose or power of music theory. Rather, theory gives you an understanding of the structure and […]
A verse-chorus chord progression pair refers to two progressions that move seamlessly one to the other, where one has those characteristics of a good verse progression and the other acts as a good chorus one. Before giving examples of these types of pairs, keep in mind that the easiest way is to create one progression that will […]
As you probably know, I use the term “musical journey” to describe a good song. I like the term mainly because it applies to pop songs that are typically short (3-4 minutes), longer, more intricate songs (5-8 minutes) or even longer prog rock-style song cycles. So describing any song as a journey is a reminder that there […]
