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 ...

Artists Greg Lester on how he crafted the classic nylon-string guitar solo in the Spice Girls’ 2 Become 1 Artists “I remember saying to Clapton, ‘You try playing that one riff for eight minutes!’”: ...

We've previously explored how getting the right drum sounds and the right effects in play when making a lo-fi track are integral, but what about the actual chords and sounds themselves? One of 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, ...

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 ...

Altered chords are chords that have been changed by having the pitch of one or more notes in the chord sharpened or flattened by a semitone. Altering a chord in this way can have a big effect on its ...

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 ...