Chord Progression Quotes

John Prine in particular... just the chord changes combined with the words. He definitely can make you cry a little bit. Just a little bit.

Songs come to me and I hear them. At least in part, they are very complete; I hear the whole chorus, including the drum pattern, the base, the countermelody, the basic harmonic structure and the main thrust of the lyric.

Lyrics can be important, but ultimately, what pulls people in on a song is melody and the tracks and the way music feels.

You grow as a writer when you learn how to make songs flow from start to finish. That's the best song, when it's such a seamless process to get to this release at the chorus, this euphoric feeling. That's why the Beatles were so good - they did such a good job building so much tension in the beginning to this immaculate release, and then it ends.

I always find that, when it comes to writing songs, if the melody and the chords are working, we're 90 per cent there.

It's really weird to be playing chords again. Haven't played chords for a long time. I realised I haven't played chord changes since OK Computer and stuff like that.

When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.

I'm a guy who doesn't know the name of the chord, but I know that it sounds good.

Chopin was a master of melody, harmony and voice leading - the art of smoothly moving from chord to chord.

I learned how to play mandolin for 'A Mighty Wind!'

It doesn't take much for anyone to pick up anything I play - it's quite simple. I go for a good song. And if you hear a good song, you don't dissect it - you just listen, and every bit seems right.

Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.

Since I was doing all of it myself, I had to decide where I wanted to go with the songs, how to proceed with the chords, if the sound was alright, and all that detail on my own.

Pop is like a puzzle: to write a perfect pop song, you never know, and there's so much that can happen in a second with a song.

I can't sing, but I'll sing over this chord progression, like, over and over, for however long it takes - sometimes it's, like, two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes - until I've found like a hook or something that I'm really happy with. And then, basically, it just like that's my melody, and that's where I start from.

I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.

The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.

See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n' roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.

I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.

I thrive on change. That's probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They'll be going along on one key and I'll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.

I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.

Even if chords are simple, they should rub. They should have dissonances in them. I've always used a lot of alternate bass lines, suspensions, widely spaced voicings. Dfferent textures to get very warm chords. Sometimes you're setting up strange chords by placing a chord in front of it that's going to set it off like a diamond in a gold band. It's not just finding interesting chords, it's how you sequence them, like stringing together pearls on a string. ... Interesting chords will compel interesting melodies. It's very hard to write a boring melody to an interesting chord sequence.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

'Chandelier' took, like, four minutes to write the chords, then, like, 12-15 minutes to write the lyrics. Probably 10 or 15 minutes to cut the vocals.

If you are having trouble making a chord, get a book, that is how I learned. There are guitar tuning apps so you can tune your guitar, and just learn how to play along with your records. And it's great to be able to play along with another musician. That is like trial by fire.