Burton Cummings

Adding Colour to Chord Progressions With a Major II-Chord

If all you need are some chord progressions to get your songwriting process started, “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting 10-eBook Bundle” contains 2 chord collections plus eBooks on how to create your own chords, and how to add chords to melodies that you’ve written. If you take a major scale and build chords above each […]

Studio singer

How Similar Must the Verse and Chorus Be Within a Song?

For most songs, the verse and chorus melodies are different. That’s the most common circumstance. But there are times, you will notice, when you’ve written a verse and a chorus that sound fine on their own, but don’t seem to work together. On the face of it, it seems that there doesn’t need to be […]

Creating Chord Progressions that Move from Minor to Major

Here’s an interesting and easy way to create chord progressions that move back and forth from minor key to major. Progressions that shift major/minor focus in this way help to create fluctuating moods that work especially well in song verses and bridge sections. To do this, you need to know that every minor key has […]

John Lenno - George Harrison

Using the Diminished Seventh Chord in Your Progressions

Take a look at the chords in pop music today, and you don’t see the diminished chord being used much. It’s an extremely versatile chord, but it’s possible that songwriters might be a bit confused as to how to use it. And by “use it”, I think many just don’t know how to approach the […]

Guitar and Piano

How Bridge Chords Work in Most Songs

A bridge (or middle-8) is the section that usually follows the second chorus of a song. Back in the earlier days of rock & roll, that bridge was likely to be strictly an 8-bar section, but these days the definition has allowed for a lot more creativity. In general, though, you can expect a bridge […]

Guitar - songwriting

Getting Control of the Character of Your Songs

What do we mean by a song’s “character?” In most cases, we’re talking about the mood or feel that we pick up from it. And we have all sorts of words that might otherwise be described as “character” words: “gentle”, “edgy”, “aggressive”, “laid back”, “dark”, and so on. Whether we know it or not, a […]