The word ‘diatonic’ simply means ‘within a key’, so a diatonic chord progression is a set of chords made up of notes from within a key signature When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

Give your chord progressions colour and flair by introducing a handful of ‘out of key’ notes. We’ve previously looked at diatonic chords, ie, chords belonging to a scale or key. As their name suggests ...

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, ...

Have you ever wondered how jazz musicians can play along to a new song that they have never heard? It is all thanks to chord progressions. And there are only about 10-20 of those that musicians use ...

The term ‘embellished’ isn’t really a theoretical one, but it seems an appropriate way to describe these examples. Sometimes an idea for a chord progression can come to us virtually complete; at other ...

It's very simple to join one chord to the next in the context of a chord progression, and one of the tools in your armoury for achieving a polished musical effect is to use what we call, 'inverted ...