How To Choose The Best Chords For Your Song - (many songwriters don’t know this simple technique)
How should we choose the chords for our songs? How do we know where to find the chords that will match the energy and emotion of the song?
Simple! Just play the first chord, and then play every other chord you know after it and see which you like! Then continue to play every single chord you know in turn until you have completely confused your ear, you have no idea what sounds good anymore, and you put your guitar down in frustration or kick the piano…
There’s nothing to stop us from experimenting, but we only have so many hours in the day, and trial and error does not always give us good results. As you learn more chords, jamming a few of them together to find an order you like may become unsatisfying as a way of choosing the best chords for your song.
This video demonstrates a way of choosing and evaluating choices based on chord function. The effect your chords will have on the listener is to do with how they relate to one another.
Chords relate to one another as tonic, subdominant and dominants - and we can use this to create cool compositional effects. You don't need to understand the theory to use the compositional idea, so watch the video to get a new tool for writing chord progressions.
Download the worksheet that goes with the video
Are you interested in developing your songwriting practice? Download Ten Creative Ways To Start Writing Songs Faster