Beach Boys - Vocals

Creating Connections Between Verse and Chorus Chord Progressions in Your Song

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 […]

Keyboard

Starting Your Progressions on Something Other Than the I-Chord

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 […]

Guitar chords - switching minor to major

Changing Key Without Actually Changing Key

If you’re looking for a way to make your chord progressions a bit more interesting, you’ll find that changing key is a good way to do it. You might, for example, have your verse in one key and your chorus in a different one. The most common way to do that is to use a […]

George Harrison

From a Minor Key Verse to Its Parallel Major

You may be familiar with the term relative major — that’s the major key that uses the same key signature as a particular minor key. It’s a very common key relationship in pop songs, because if you’ve written a song that uses a minor key verse, and you decide to switch to major for the chorus, […]

Keyboard player - songwriter - chord inversions

Ideas for Experimenting With a Chord Progression

Do you find that your fingers keep moving to the same chord progressions every time you sit down to improvise ideas for your next song? One of the easiest ways of dealing with this is to use a collection of chord progressions and start playing through them. (Check out the collections in my eBook Bundle […]

Genesis - 1978

Chord Progressions: The Journey Away, and the Journey Back Home

Chord progressions, at least the kind you find in the pop genres, aren’t usually overly complex. Even when they are a bit more creative than mainstream, they don’t tend to leave the tonic chord too far in the distance. The kind of progressions you find in a chorus are usually more simplistic in structure than […]