Chords

Your riffs, rhythm parts and solos can all benefit from a minor 7 arpeggio injection

Josh Smith offers a road map for harmonically interesting blues guitar playing, offering fresh ideas for connecting notes between chords

Learn how chords can tap into emotions and you can improve your rhythm chops – and songwriting – fast

Pull solo ideas from both sides of the happy/sad spectrum of tonality

British jazz maestro Martin Taylor talks us through his chord and walking bassline approach, while keeping that swing going all the time

Increase your musical vocabulary and expand your compositional horizons, in each and every key

Here are five chords with names to test the brain and a sound that's kind to the ear. Add them to your chord vocabulary now

It's one of the oldest tricks in the book, used by everyone from the Beatles to Neil Young and Pink Floyd, but playing around the major and minor tonalities can produce melodies that stick in the mind forever

Using open strings to embellish your chord work can yield magical results

We all think of the blues solo in terms of which notes sit atop which chords, but reversing that proposition – and building chords into the solo itself – generates some tasty new phrasing ideas