What Beatles songs taught me | Page 2 | Fab forum

As a songwriter (un-famous, un-published, un-paid ) for some 30 years now, with about 150 songs I've written, I've only recently begun paying more attention to the way John and Paul used chord changes to try to learn some new tricks.  I probably absorbed stuff from them over the years by osmosis, but I think it might also help me to study them more directly.

Still, if I may toot my own horn, I think quite a few of my songs have neat chord changes.

While I have largely ignored Beatles music in terms of studying it, I have spent quite a bit of time over the years studying the chord changes of three other musicians I really like -- Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Gordon Lightfoot.  One habit of James Taylor is to use what his songbooks call "A7dim/Bb" which is really just playing the open A7 chord but using a Bb bass instead of A -- James Taylor has this trick he employs a lot, going from A or A7 with a normal A bass, then transitioning via the "A7dim/Bb" chord to some chord with a B bass (often Bm7, sometimes Em7), and I have incorporated this into a few of my songs.  I hope to pick up at least one or two tricks from Paul and/or John.