In this frankly epic tutorial we're concentrating solely on chords and chordal ideas, and the following will act as a compendium of great chord fingerings. The audio examples start with simple chords ...

A study suggests that minor and major seventh chords are the happiest sounds in music, but today’s songwriters are ditching them in favour of simple minor chords. But why does this matter? We all love ...

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, ...

Guitar lessons: You’d be forgiven for thinking that you’d use the minor scale to construct minor 7th chords, but that’s not quite how it works. All scales and chords are compared to the major scale, ...

If there’s one thing you can do to take your songwriting to the next level, it’s getting to grips with new chords. Use our acoustic guitar chord charts - from basic open chords to the daddy of altered ...

Do you associate minor chords with sad music and major chords with happy music? If you do, you probably grew up surrounded by music that follows the basic rules of Western music theory. But not ...

Harmonic minor keys are used when writing chords. There is another version of the minor key known as the melodic minor. This is used when writing a melody. Each key signature has two possible keys.

Much of our music, from classical to contemporary, is written in either a major or minor key (with exceptions, such as jazz, which uses neither). For most, a major key conjures up feelings of ...