Often when discussing songwriting, we divide it into its two main elements, words and music. But just as lyrics contain a multitude of sub-categories and considerations, so does music. It contains the ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Believe it or not, this isn’t breaking copyright law: anyone can lift a chord sequence from a song and use it to kick-start a new ...

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 ...

To celebrate the 30th anniversary issue of American Songwriter (Jan/Feb 2015), “Measure for Measure” served up a smorgasbord of 30 handpicked, solid gold chord progressions. This e-book supplements ...

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 ...

Generally with folk you’ll be playing fingerstyle, but standard strumming is commonplace too and sounds great with open-string drone chords. Altered tunings feature heavily and will help bust you out ...