Reference library
Free songwriting reference, organised. Every common chord, every diatonic progression in every key, the open-chord embellishments that turn a plain progression into a song, the arpeggio shapes you'll actually use. Built to be skimmed quickly when you're mid-song, not to teach you music theory cover-to-cover.
The Blues — deep dive Study guide
A complete study of the music under everything else you play: every blues form as a countable bar chart, how call-and-response phrasing actually works, the turnaround vocabulary, ten players' worth of language to steal, and a two-week practice plan that gets it into your hands.
Open the blues deep dive →Jazz — deep dive Study guide
Jazz without the conservatory: the five forms behind a thousand standards, the six harmony devices that cover ninety percent of what happens in them, the learnable mechanics of improvising, how tunes start and stop, the guitar lineage, and the ten standards to learn first — in the right order.
Open the jazz deep dive →Songwriting tools Interactive
Four interactive worksheets that take a song from a first feeling to a finished draft: lyric expansion, thematic clustering, chord-progression development and a melody map. Work online with autosave, save your progress to a file to reload anywhere, or download the branded PDFs to write on paper.
Open the songwriting tools →Chord progressions in every key
The seven diatonic chords of any key, the six progressions songwriters actually use, the borrowed chords that add colour, the song examples that prove they work. Use it to find a progression in a key you're already playing in, or to transpose one you know.
All 24 keys →Individual chord reference
Every common chord with 10+ voicings (CAGED full shapes, triad shapes, piano voicings), the theory behind it, common progressions including it, and real songs that lean on it. Tap a name to see all of it.
All 50 chords →Open-chord embellishments
The eight open chords (E, A, D, G, C, Em, Am, Dm) with all the safe scale-degree moves that produce named variants (Cmaj7, Csus4, Cadd9, etc), plus the risky ones that need context. The trick every acoustic guitarist learns the slow way, here in one place.
All 8 chords + overview →Arpeggio shapes
The five major CAGED arpeggio shapes (C, A, G, E, D) and their minor versions (Cm, Am, Gm, Em, Dm), each with 4-note and 3-note variations, theory, practice drills, and the songwriting contexts they actually appear in. Plus a 15-minute daily drill plan on the overview.
All 10 shapes + drills →Want a tool instead of a reference?
The reference library is for looking things up. The chord progression builder is for building progressions interactively, RhymeForge for finding rhymes, CollisionLab for breaking out of literal language, Morning Pages for clearing the head before writing, SenseSpark for sensory prompts. All free, all in the browser.