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 ...

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 ...

Guitar skills: These chords include the C and Cm from the demo piece, but go on to suggest a dramatic neo-classical style chord progression when used together. Why not apply the approach used in the ...

When composing a song, not only the melody but also the chord progressions that support that melody are extremely important. However, there are countless chord progression patterns, and searching and ...

The "Neapolitan 6th" chord (N6) is another sonority whose definition is based on the triad that it makes, which is a vertical perspective that glosses over its actual horizontal function. It is ...

You may have seen one of the various online videos in which a musician will demonstrate ‘100 songs in 4 minutes’ or ‘play 50 songs with only these 4 chords’ and so on. There is a slight technical flaw ...

Ivan Hewett is The Telegraph’s Classical Music Critic and an author whose works include Music: Healing The Rift, a personal history of modern music. He has been involved in music as a composer, ...