Guitar chord progressions: generate one, or pick from the chart

Two ways to use this page. The generator above builds a chord progression in any key, plays it back with piano, bass and drums, and hands you the chords or a MIDI file. The chart below gives you the progressions that most songs are already built on, written out in all twelve keys, so you can read the one you need instead of generating it. Both are free, with no account, like the rest of our free guitar tools.

How to use the generator

The quickest route is the row of mood buttons under the playback bar. Each one sets the style family, the mode, the rhythm, the tempo, the bass pattern, the voicing, the sevenths and the swing in a single click, then picks a progression that fits. A chorus that lands gives you I V vi IV in major at a moderate tempo. Something sad gives you i VI III VII in minor, slower. Simple jazz gives you ii V I with sevenths and a swing feel. Surprise me takes one at random from the experimental family.

The chart: common progressions in every key

This is the chart most people are looking for. Every row is one of the twelve major keys. The first four columns are the four chords that carry the great majority of popular songs: I, IV, V and vi. Put them in the order I V vi IV and you have the pop progression. Rotate it to vi IV I V and you have the same four chords with a darker opening. I IV V on its own is older and plainer, and it is the frame of the blues.

The last column is the jazz cadence, ii V I, written with the sevenths it is normally played with. It is the same V going home to I as in the pop progression, with one chord added in front to set it up.

One practical note on keys. C, G, D, A and E are the comfortable ones on guitar, because their chords fall on open shapes. The flat keys are where wind instruments and singers often live, and on guitar they mean a capo or barre chords, which are two movable shapes rather than twelve new ones. That is not a reason to avoid them: it is a reason to know that a song in E flat may be a song in D with a capo on the first fret.

Minor chord progressions

A minor progression is not a major progression made sad. It is built on the same seven degrees, counted from a different note, and three of those degrees come out a half step lower: the third, the sixth and the seventh. That is the whole difference, and it is enough to change the character of everything above it.

The progression to start with is i VI III VII. It appears in ballads, in rock, in film music, and it is the one the generator gives you when you press Something sad or A modern loop. Each chord in it is a plain triad, and nothing in it needs a barre. The table gives it in all twelve minor keys, each one the relative minor of the major key beside it, which means the two share the same chords and the same sharps and flats.

Two more worth knowing. i iv V i keeps the minor tonic and the minor fourth but makes the fifth major, which gives the strongest possible pull back home: in A minor that is Am, Dm, E, Am. The generator files it under Latin and world. Its all minor cousin, i iv v i, sits in the ballad family: nothing in it pulls, and that is the point. Set the mode to minor in either family and the chords in the list come out minor.

The 12-bar blues

The 12-bar blues is the one progression it is worth memorizing as a shape rather than as a list. Twelve bars, three chords, and the same twelve bars repeat for as long as the song lasts. Here it is in degrees, one line per four bars.

| I  | I  | I  | I  |
| IV | IV | I  | I  |
| V  | IV | I  | V  |

Read it as three phrases. Four bars of home, two bars away and two bars back, then the turnaround: the fifth, the fourth, home, and the fifth again to push you into the next twelve bars. That last bar is why the loop never feels finished, and why a blues can run for ten minutes without anyone deciding to stop it.

In the key of A, with the dominant sevenths the blues is played with, the same grid reads like this.

| A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 |
| D7 | D7 | A7 | A7 |
| E7 | D7 | A7 | E7 |

Two variants you will meet. The quick change puts the fourth degree in bar two, so the second bar is D7 rather than A7, which stops the opening from sitting still. And the minor blues keeps the same twelve bars with minor chords, i iv v, which is where a lot of slow blues lives. The generator's blues family starts from I7 IV7 V7 and adds two longer forms that walk through the fourth and the fifth, and the Blues or jam button sets a shuffle feel and a walking bass under them.

One detail that is pure guitar. Every chord in a blues is a dominant seventh, including the first one, which in strict theory it should not be. The blues decided otherwise long ago, and the result is that no chord ever fully rests. That is the sound.

The same twelve bars are also where a lot of rock starts, and there the sevenths usually go and the chords thin down to a root and a fifth: our power chords guide covers that family and where each one sits on the neck.

Why these progressions work (I, IV, V, vi)

The chords in a progression are not chosen because they sound nice next to each other. They are chosen because they come from the same scale. A major key gives you seven notes, and building a chord on each of them gives you seven chords: I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi and a diminished vii. Every one of them is made only of notes already in the key, which is why any order of them sounds like it belongs together. The generator does not pick chords at random. It plays degrees.

This is also why the numerals are worth learning before the letters. I V vi IV is one thing you learn once, and it gives you a progression in all twelve keys for free. The chart above is really just that one idea written out twelve times. And if the key you need is awkward on guitar, moving the shapes with a capo is often faster than learning new ones: our guitar capo chart says which fret turns which shape into which chord.

Who made this

Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. The generator exists because the hardest moment in writing is the empty page, and the chart exists because most of the time you do not need a new progression, you need the one you already half know, written down in the right key. Neither asks you to sign up. The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way, and if you are at the stage of learning the shapes rather than the order, start with the basic guitar chords. More about who writes these pages and how they are checked is on our about page.