A Complete Guide to Songwriting, Arranging and Playing Your Own Music
Welcome to Songwriting For Guitar | Essential Chords & Progressions!
What you’ll learn
- Build a complete song from start to finish, one section at a time.
- Structure a full song: intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and outro.
- Find and play major, minor, and diminished chords anywhere on the neck.
- Apply strumming, fingerstyle, and picking patterns to progressions.
- Visualize major & minor scale degrees on the fretboard in any key.
- Write diatonic chord progressions in major and minor keys.
- Reinforce ear training for intervals, scales, and chords to connect what you hear with what you play.
- Understand the theory behind intentional songwriting decisions — not just guessing what sounds good.
Course Content
- Theory –> 2 lectures • 39min.
- Fretboard –> 6 lectures • 35min.
- Harmony –> 5 lectures • 45min.
- Rhythm –> 3 lectures • 24min.
- Arrangement –> 1 lecture • 17min.
Requirements
Welcome to Songwriting For Guitar | Essential Chords & Progressions!
This course takes everything you’ve learned about scales, chords, and the fretboard and turns it into actual songs — giving you a repeatable process for writing music from start to finish.
Whether you’re a beginner who knows basic chords or an intermediate player looking to break out of playing other people’s songs, this course will teach you how to write your own. You’ll learn how to build chord progressions, shape them into song sections (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro), and assemble everything into a complete composition.
Through a blend of clear instruction and practical assignments, you’ll develop a songwriter’s toolkit that works in any genre. You’ll move beyond random chord progressions and start writing with intention — understanding why certain chords work together, how to create contrast between sections, and how to structure a song that keeps listeners engaged.
Our step-by-step approach ensures that you’re not just learning theory, but applying it directly to the guitar. With targeted exercises, fretboard prompts, and composition assignments, you’ll build your song one block at a time. By the end of this course, you will have written a complete song — from the first note of the intro to the final chord of the outro.
This comprehensive approach makes songwriting approachable and methodical, regardless of whether you’ve ever written a song before.
This is Part 2 of my guitar course series.
Part 1 – Music Theory & Fretboard Fundamentals covered the essential theory, intervals, scales, chords, and fretboard visualization.
Part 2 – Essential Chords & Progressions takes everything from Part 1 and puts it into action. Here, you’ll learn how to write chord progressions, structure song sections, and build complete songs from the ground up.
Part 3 – Intermediate Chords (Coming Soon
Part 4 – Advanced Chords (Coming Soon)
If you haven’t taken Part 1, you can still succeed — but you should be comfortable with major scales, basic chord shapes, and finding notes on the fretboard.
Section 1: Theory
- This is both a comprehensive review and distillation of Part 1 – Music Theory and Fretboard Fundamentals.
Section 2: Fretboard
- Learn to visualize scale degrees for major and minor across the fretboard in any key — the foundation for visualizing and understanding chord progressions.
Section 3: Harmony
- Master open chords, barre chords, close-voiced triads, and inversions — building a complete chord vocabulary across the fretboard.
Section 4: Rhythm
- Learn variations on strumming, picking and fingerstyle patterns to apply them to chord progressions that you write in the Harmony section.
Section 5: Arrangement
- Write every section of a song: intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and outro — all in the same key, building block by block.
This course is designed for guitarists who already know basic chords (including barre chords) and want to write their own music. Whether you’ve never written a song before or have started and gotten stuck, this course provides a clear, repeatable framework for composition.
For those who want to stop playing other people’s songs and start creating their own, this course will connect the dots between fretboard knowledge and real songwriting.