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 ...

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 ...

In 1804 Beethoven wrote his magnificent and epoch-making third Symphony, which we know today as the ‘Eroica’. About three quarters of the way through the first movement the music climbs to a point of ...

When we learn about creating a chord from a scale, we list the notes in order of appearance: Root, 3rd, 5th. However, swapping this order around can sometimes be really effective. Shifting the 3rd (or ...

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, ...