Guitar skills: When it comes to chord progressions, you don’t have to break new ground to write great songs. In fact, some basic chord progressions have been used repeatedly in hundreds of pop and ...

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 ...

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 ...

Artists Greg Lester on how he crafted the classic nylon-string guitar solo in the Spice Girls’ 2 Become 1 Artists “I remember saying to Clapton, ‘You try playing that one riff for eight minutes!’”: ...

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, ...

Hookpad is a web app for music composition, and it’s also a killer way to learn about music theory. Hookpad and its companion theory app/book have been around for a while. The problem was, it only ...

Neo Soul is a genre that is hard to escape from; it’s everywhere from Instagram and Tik Tok to mainstream pop, bringing guitar talent and inspiring chord playing to new audiences. Neo Soul is a style ...

Lo-fi is to audio what black-and-white or sepia-tinted film is to visual. Often lo-fi tracks will loop a sample from an old vinyl record, complete with scratches and crackles, then drop it over a ...