Listen up: scales aren’t just torture devices invented by guitar teachers... When you use a scale, say, C major, you are playing ‘in the key of C’. The word ‘diatonic’ simply means ‘within a key’, so ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A great way to get started writing a song is to use a well-known chord progression. Certain progressions have been used thousands of times throughout the history of recorded music, so there’s no ...

The most important aspect to study in melody writing is probably your intervals. In Western music, we use 12 notes in semitone intervals, in other cultures they have quarter tones and microtonal ...

Bass Week: As bass players we naturally have to know our chords, and ideally a fair bit about harmony and chord progressions in general, as we are the ones banging out the root notes! But there are ...