I was surfing the internet recently and came across a good webpage describing how to use chord substitutions to spice up a boring chord progression.

I feel like I have a decent grasp on basic musical theory (something I’ll share for the newer songwriters among us one of these days), but I’ll admit that once you get past basic major and minor chords, and maybe a handful of sevenths and what-not, I become pretty useless.

This article does a good job at explaining when you can use certain types of chords to make your progressions sound more full and interesting.

Sometimes we spend hours, days, even months, struggling to find the perfect chord progression to suit the lyrics we’ve written. And then we find it, only to get bored sick of the same chords being repeated over, and over, and over again.

If you listen to some of the great songwriters, you’ll notice that the chorus progressions, if not all progressions in the song, are constantly being varied in both subtle and obvious ways. This tutorial will take you through a bunch of ways to vary up your chord progressions to retain not only your own interest, but your listeners’ interest as well.

The article is written as an 8-step tutorial complete with audio examples.

Take a chord progression that you’ve had laying around for a while (or write a simple new one) and test out the methods in the article. Maybe you’ll come up with something you like!

Read the entire article HERE

200 Useful chord phrases in C Major

I was looking around on Twitter today for posts about songwriting today, (by the way, if you’re not following me, please do so by clicking the little blue bird at the top right hand corner of this page) and I came across a blog called Paul Nordquist’s Unruly Beast of a Song Blog and I instantly loved it so much that I had to add a link to this site, as well as write this post about one of his articles in particular.

The post that caught my eye was titled “200 Useful Chord Phrases in C Major”. Here’s a little Excerpt from the post

Wherever you need a phrase of music, just drop in one of these chord phrases. (One key tip: Use repetition; that is, use some of the chord phrases more than once. It helps your song hang together.)

By the way, these chord phrases are not random; they’re in a sort of functional order. So don’t just pick from the beginning of the list. Use dice or something to choose at random from the entire list.

1. C – - -
2. C Csus4 C Csus4
3. C – Am -
4. C Am C Am
5. Am – - -
6. C – F C
7. C Am F C
8. C E♭ F C
9. C Dm F C
10. C D7 Fm C
11. C Em F C
12. C G F C
13. C B♭ F C
14. C F Dm C
15. C Em Dm C

If you want to read the rest of the post, and I have no idea why you would not want to, click HERE