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 ...

Guitar skills: Getting to grips with new chords is a sure-fire way to take your songwriting in new directions and, hopefully, to the next level. So our charts are here to help you find your own voice ...

Listen up: scales aren’t just torture devices invented by guitar teachers... When you use a scale, say, C major, you are playing ‘in the key of C’. The word ‘diatonic’ simply means ‘within a key’, so ...

Guitar lessons: You’d be forgiven for thinking that you’d use the minor scale to construct minor 7th chords, but that’s not quite how it works. All scales and chords are compared to the major scale, ...

Dwang. Dwang. Dwang. Dwang. Dwang. Dwang. Six dwangs. Four seconds. It's an A minor chord that sounds slightly out of tune and thinly metallic. It's a primitive, janky sound voiced in open D tuning, ...

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 ...

90% of people who try to learn guitar quit in the first year. So when Brian Fan wanted to start strumming out lullabies for his baby daughter, he reinvented the instrument itself. Suddenly, a single ...

To begin our investigation into the hidden cause of our peculiar perception of minor chords and keys, we will listen to a trombone quartet playing a C minor chord. We might describe the sound as "rich ...