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 ...

Triads are three-note chords made up of the lowest note (known as the root note), a middle note, (the third), and the top note (the fifth). But when you play a set of diatonic chords like this, built ...

Being able to create your own music in an integral part to becoming a great musician. Having been a musician myself for 18 years, I know firsthand how exciting and rewarding it can be to write your ...

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, ...

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 ...

If viewed within the bewildering context of the history of western music, the triad is one of the absolute bedrocks of all ...

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 ...