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 ...

We kick off the first in a series of music theory tutorials with a look at the very basics of chord construction When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Almost every song in the pop charts is built around the same four chords. And it's nothing new – they're the same three chords that Pachelbel used in his famous Canon. But why do we keep coming back ...