Hello Songwork Members! 

This week's videos are from Bonnie Hayes and Randall Williams. If you've enjoyed parts 1 & 2 of Bonnie's "Writing Emotional Songs" series, then you'll be thrilled with this third and final part of that series - focusing on chords. I think you'll see that it really goes hand in hand with this week's second video release, Randall Williams' "Chord Function and Substitution."

We hope you enjoy this week's new videos, and please don't hesitate to let the Songwork team know what you think!

Sincerely,

Jonelle Vette 

Editorial Director at Songwork.com

Writing Emotional Songs, Part 3: Chords

Instructor: Bonnie Hayes

In this video Bonnie Hayes shows you ways to combine your chords and melody notes to bring out different kinds of emotions in your songs. Without getting into technical jargon, she shows how specific inversions, tensions over chords, and varying the bass notes of your chords can all be used as tools for eliciting just the right sort of emotions. It's really fascinating stuff. 

Chord Function and Substitution

Instructor: Randall Williams 

Substitution - using other chords to fill a similar harmonic function - is where, as Randall likes to say, "juiciness" comes from. And juiciness amounts to really great surprises in songs that make us want to go back and listen again and again.