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 ...

The word ‘diatonic’ simply means ‘within a key’, so a diatonic chord progression is a set of chords made up of notes from within a key signature When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

The wonderful world of musical punctuation offers near-endless possibilities. Get to grips with them today... When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s ...

Whether you mean to or not, you’ll almost inevitably work in a particular key when writing a song. You might decide “right, this will be in C minor,” or you might just string together a seemingly ...

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, ...

The ii-V-I has been referred to as a chord progression, a turnaround, and a cadence depending on the circumstances it is used. It is most known as the jazz progression as it is the backbone of many ...

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 for achieving a polished musical effect is to use what we call, 'inverted ...

Vivek Maddala is an Emmy-winning composer and a regular participant in The Number Ones Comment Section. After reading his takes on the music theory behind several historic hits, we invited him to turn ...

Almost every song in the pop charts is built around the same four chords. And it's nothing new – they're the same three chords that Pachelbel used in his famous Canon. But why do we keep coming back ...

Making music is a form of therapy for Doechii.Rather than crafting songs that fit current pop-music expectations, she writes deeply personal stories and performs them as catharsis. Unlike other ...