Do you associate minor chords with sad music and major chords with happy music? If you do, you probably grew up surrounded by music that follows the basic rules of Western music theory. But not ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Man playing electric guitar Over the last two columns, we looked at various ways to craft melodic solos over alternating relative ...

Guitar skills: These extended chords are based on a major 7th chord. For example, a C chord contains C, E and G notes. These are the first, third and fifth notes of ...

Every style of music uses major chords - for many players, the first thing they learn is a handful of these essential shapes. Still, once you get ‘under the hood’ there’s a lot to learn, and it’s not ...

A study suggests that minor and major seventh chords are the happiest sounds in music, but today’s songwriters are ditching them in favour of simple minor chords. But why does this matter? We all love ...

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, ...