Built on the 2nd degree of the major scale and with a trademark bittersweet sound, the Dorian mode is a favourite amongst jazz and blues players. And, though you can certainly use it in any genre, the ...

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, ...

Whether you mean to or not, you’ll almost inevitably work in a particular key when writing a song. You might decide “right, this will be in C minor,” or you might just string together a seemingly ...

Almost every song you hear has a chord progression. This forms the harmonic content of the song, and is often what gives a song its emotional impact. But what about the melody? The notes of the melody ...

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 ...

The derivation of chordscales for minor ii-V-i progressions is less straightforward than with major ii-V-Is. Each minor key has three scales whereas each major key has just one. In this lesson, watch ...