The presence of a well-crafted and performed chord progression can often be the glue that gels the song together. If executed well, it should support your melody and lyric, while grabbing listeners on ...

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 ...

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 ...

In musical terms, a cadence is a short phrase, usually a sequence of two chords, that’s used to ‘punctuate’ a chord progression. In the same way that regular punctuation in a text has commas, full ...

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 ...