Every key has seven chords that exist naturally within that key. And they’re easy to find. First, take any key (C major, for instance), and play a chord that uses each note of the scale as a root. To know if you should be playing a major, minor or diminished chord, follow this simple guide that uses […]
Repetition in music of any genre is vital to its success. That wasn’t always the case. If you go back a few centuries, much music was “through-composed”, a term that refers to music that was one new idea after another, with very little repetition. Through-composed music has the benefit of establishing a mood, and then keeping that mood. […]
Most songs consist of several sections that are all woven together to produce one coherent piece of music. The trick is to get all those sections to move seamlessly one to the next. Seamlessly, in this context, doesn’t mean that you move from section to section without realizing it, of course. In that sense, it’s […]
There are very few songs on the Rolling Stones List of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time that made it to the list because of their stunning chord progressions. Chord progressions, when they work well, should almost disappear into the background of your song. Occasionally it’s nice to throw a chord in there that grabs attention, but […]
Music develops and changes over time as a kind of evolution: it takes what’s happened before, copying it to a large extent, but making small changes that move in a slightly new direction. It’s what biologists call “descent with modification from a common ancestor” in their field. We like to think that the music we’re writing is […]
A circle of fifths (CoF) progression is one that includes chords whose roots move up or down by 5ths. Dm Am Em Bdim, for example, is an ascending CoF progression. You can hear that there’s a pleasant sense of predictability that results from this kind of progression. There are many ways to use the CoF, including […]
