Songs That Use Pedal Points

Tommaso Zillio

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Pedal points are one of the most tasteful and useful music theory tricks that you can use in songwriting.

It's not a chance that they are used all the time in any style of music. If you are a songwriter you simply must know how to write a song with a pedal point in it.

But what is a pedal point, and where we can hear them?

Well, on what it is: a pedal point is simply a note held or repeated through multiple chord changes. That is, the note stays the same, the chord changes, and the contrast between these two things is very interesting and (usually) pleasing to the ear.

Of course, there is more than one kind of pedal point, but more about this below.

Where can we hear them? Well, here's a new video that shows a few examples of the different kind of pedal points and how they are used in famous songs.

And to show you that Pedal Points are really used in all styles, I made sure to pick examples from a wide variety of genres.

Once you hear the pedal point sound, you will be able to recognize it anywhere and also you will be able to use it on your songs so... watch the video and enjoy.

If you want a more technical explanation and more examples of how you can use pedal points, I talk more about pedal points and how to use them on guitar in both rhythm and lead parts in this lesson below.

Finally, you may have noticed that a pedal point only sound great when the chord progression you are using it with is great too. When you use a pedal point on a 'meh' chord progression, the result is definitely 'meh'.

So to sound great you do want to know how to write great chord progressions - and if you are a guitar player, you want to know how to do it on a guitar, not on a piano (if you find theory hard as a guitar player, it's because most theory books and resources have been written by piano players for piano players).

If you want to learn chords and harmony natively on the guitar, then you are ready for the Complete Chord Mastery guitar course that teacher you all the ins and outs of chords, chord progressions, substitutions, harmonization, etc... all done straight on the guitar fretboard. Go an check it out right now.