

One perennial issue for songwriters is what to do when they’ve come up with a melody line and need a chord progression to fit it. The chord progressions used in most pop songs are relatively simple, mostly consisting of a cycle of between two and four chords that are diatonic to the song’s key.ĭiatonic means that the chords are made up of notes in the parent scale of the key - so if a song is in the key of E major, say, then the majority of the notes in the melody will be found in the E major scale, and the notes that make up the supporting chords - bar one or two exotic exceptions maybe - will be taken from the E major scale too.
