Guitar skills: Getting to grips with new chords is a sure-fire way to take your songwriting in new directions and, hopefully, to the next level. So our charts are here to help you find your own voice ...

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 ...

Daniel Levitin, in his popular bestseller entitled This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession from 2006, characterizes the perception of the minor chord, which lowers the third of a ...

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, ...

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, ...

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 ...