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 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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Conventional wisdom dictates that a well-written song will stand up even when reduced to simple chords on acoustic guitar. But at some point, we’ve all heard songs in which complex or unusual chord ...

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 ...