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 […]
Because good songwriting usually starts with improvising ideas based on your instincts, you may not have given much thought to what note your tunes start on. The chord you choose, in most circumstances anyway, limits your choices to 3 notes: the root, the 3rd or the 5th. Understandably, there’s no rule that governs what the […]
If you’re a chords-first songwriter, it means that you come up with a chord progression, and then try to design a melody that goes with it. What you may not know is that if you’re a melody-first writer, you’re probably also working out the chords at the same time. That’s because our musical brains have […]
