Tutorials Audio

Chord Progressions That Work, and Why They Do

By Infinite Creation · Beginner · ~15 min

The Short Version

A small number of chord progressions account for an implausible share of popular music, and they have held across sixty years and every genre that uses harmony at all. That is not laziness or theft. Each of them solves a particular problem in how tension is built and released, and once you can hear what a progression is doing rather than just recognise it, you can choose one on purpose and alter it without destroying the thing that made it work.

Before You Start

Any instrument or piano roll where you can hold four chords
A metronome or a slow drum loop, because progressions are judged in time
A way to record a rough pass, since judging harmony while playing it is unreliable

Walkthrough

Number the chords instead of naming them

Give each chord in the key a number, one to seven. A progression written as numbers is portable: it works in any key and it lets you compare two songs that sound nothing alike and see that they are doing the same thing. Almost everyone who works with progressions fluently thinks in numbers rather than letters.

Learn what the first, fourth and fifth do

These three carry most of the weight in Western harmony. One is home. Five creates the strongest pull back to home, because it contains the note that most wants to resolve. Four sits somewhere between, stable enough to rest on but clearly not home. A very large amount of music is these three arranged in different orders.

Add the sixth for the minor colour

The sixth chord in a major key is minor and shares two notes out of three with the tonic, so it can substitute for home while sounding darker. Adding it to the other three produces the four-chord set that dominates modern popular music, in every rotation of its order.

Notice that order changes the meaning entirely

The same four chords starting from the minor sixth sound wistful, and starting from the tonic sound triumphant. Nothing changed except which one the loop resolves to, which is the clearest demonstration that a progression is about motion rather than about its ingredients.

Change one chord to make it yours

Take a progression you like and replace a single chord with one that shares two of its three notes. The motion survives, the colour changes, and the result rarely sounds like the source. This is a more productive route than writing progressions from nothing, and it is how a great deal of writing actually happens.

Try borrowing one chord from outside the key

A chord using a note the key does not contain lands as a surprise precisely because everything around it has established what to expect. Borrowing from the parallel minor is the most common version, and one borrowed chord in a song is usually more effective than five.

Judge it in the arrangement, not alone

A progression that sounds ordinary on a piano can be transformed by rhythm, voicing and instrumentation, and one that sounds clever alone can be unusable once a vocal is over it. Decide with the other parts present.

Watch Out For

Voicing changes a progression more than most people expect. The same four chords played in tight inversions rather than root position can sound like different music.
A bass note that is not the root of the chord is one of the cheapest ways to make a familiar progression sound unfamiliar.
If a progression feels static, check whether it ever leaves the tonic. Loops that keep returning home have nothing to resolve.
Progressions are not copyrightable in themselves, which is why the same four chords recur so freely. The melody over them is a different matter.

Knowledge Base

The Longer Answer

Two questions recur: whether reusing a common progression is a problem, and why some progressions feel sad.

Whether it matters that a progression is common

Chord progressions have been shared freely across the whole history of recorded music, and the same handful appear in songs separated by decades and continents. This is not generally treated as a problem, legally or artistically, because a progression is closer to a sentence structure than to a sentence: what a listener recognises as a song is the melody, the words, the production and the performance.

The practical consequence is that a familiar progression buys you a listener's comfort cheaply, and you spend your originality somewhere the listener will actually notice it. Writers who insist on unusual harmony in every song often end up with music that is distinctive and hard to remember.

Why minor is heard as sad

The honest answer is that a large part of it is learned. The association between minor keys and sadness is strong in listeners raised on Western music and considerably weaker in listeners who were not, which is what you would expect from a convention rather than an acoustic fact.

There is a physical component underneath the convention. The intervals in a major triad line up more simply with the natural overtones of a vibrating string, and the minor third does not, so a minor chord carries slightly more internal friction. That is a small effect compared with sixty years of hearing minor keys used for sad songs, and both are worth knowing, because the learned part is the part you are actually writing for.

Where This Fits

Chords are where much of the material comes from, the first stage of Making a Record.

FAQ

Q: How many progressions do I need to know?
A: Four or five, thoroughly. Knowing what each is doing and how to alter it is worth far more than a list of thirty you can name and cannot use.

Q: Why do my progressions sound like nothing is happening?
A: Usually because every chord is played the same way, for the same length, in the same register. Harmony is only one of the parts that has to move.

Q: Should the bass always play the root?
A: No, and always doing so is one reason progressions sound generic. Putting the third or fifth in the bass changes the weight of a chord without changing the chord.

Q: Is there a progression that always works?
A: No, because a progression works in a context. The four-chord set is popular because it works in a very wide range of contexts, not because it works in all of them.

Vocabulary

Progression An ordered sequence of chords. The order matters more than the contents, because the same chords rotated to resolve somewhere else can change from triumphant to wistful without a single note being replaced.

Voicing Which notes of a chord are played, in what register and in what order. It changes the character of a progression substantially while leaving the underlying harmony untouched.

Borrowed chord A chord using notes from outside the current key, most often taken from the parallel minor. It works as a surprise because the surrounding music has already established what a listener expects.

Inversion A chord with something other than its root in the bass. It is one of the cheapest ways to make a familiar progression sound unfamiliar, because the bass note strongly colours how the whole chord is heard.