Which comes first: chords or meloody? That's the chicken and egg question facing any music maker staring at a blank DAW screen, and there's no right answer as to which you need to nail first. And ...

It goes without saying that a good chord progression can be fundamental to a quality song, but when you find yourself staring at a blank screen, how do you get started and string an appropriate set of ...

In musical terms, a cadence is a short phrase, usually a sequence of two chords, that’s used to ‘punctuate’ a chord progression. In the same way that regular punctuation in a text has commas, full ...

A lot of the elements that make pop music successful relate to it being catchy and familiar. As a songwriter, there are many ways to engender this feeling in listeners, to do with song structure, ...

Composing music is a pretty mindful activity in its own right, but there’s certainly an argument to say that putting more focus on harmony, and thinking carefully about modulations between keys, can ...

To celebrate the 30th anniversary issue of American Songwriter (Jan/Feb 2015), “Measure for Measure” served up a smorgasbord of 30 handpicked, solid gold chord progressions. This e-book supplements ...

It's very simple to join one chord to the next in the context of a chord progression, and one of the tools in your armoury ...