Suspended chords
If you’re always looking for ways to add a dash of tension and forward movement to a chord progression, one of the easiest ways to do this is to use suspended chords. Faithful rock fallbacks since the days of John Lennon and The Who – songs like 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)' and 'Pinball Wizard' are just two famous tunes that make use of a whole sequence of them – suspended chords have more than earned their spurs as properly established songwriting tools in mainstream music. But what are they, exactly?
The idea of suspended chords originally derives from suspensions, a term used to describe notes that hang over into the following chord before eventually resolving to the notes in that second chord – a
