When it comes to guitar chords, it all begins with basic ones that are called either major (use just the letter of the chord, eg E for E major) or minor (reduced to the letter plus m, eg Em for E ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit: Getty Images Conventional wisdom dictates that a well-written song will stand up even ...

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 ...

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 ...

Once you know how to construct major and minor scales on the piano, you can take the notes within them and start stacking them up together to play chords. While it’s possible to form simple two-note ...

Daniel Levitin, in his popular bestseller entitled This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession from 2006, characterizes the perception of the minor chord, which lowers the third of a ...

Conventional wisdom dictates that a well-written song will stand up even when reduced to simple chords on acoustic guitar. But at some point, we’ve all heard songs in which complex or unusual chord ...