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 ...

Guitar skills: When it comes to chord progressions, you don’t have to break new ground to write great songs. In fact, some basic chord progressions have been used repeatedly in hundreds of pop and ...

You may have seen one of the various online videos in which a musician will demonstrate ‘100 songs in 4 minutes’ or ‘play 50 songs with only these 4 chords’ and so on. There is a slight technical flaw ...

Artists “I remember saying to Clapton, ‘You try playing that one riff for eight minutes!’”: The secret to Status Quo's riff power Artists “It was a challenge to myself: ‘I’m not gonna have a chorus in ...

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, ...

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 ...

There are a lot of MIDI plugins that aim to do everything for you, but it's refreshing to see one that keeps its remit simple. Trackbout's Ripchord is a free plugin that lets you play a sequence of ...