Chord Progression Generator

How to use the chord progression generator

1. Pick a style, or hit the dice. Each style holds a handful of progressions that genuinely belong to it — the jazz list is built on the ii–V–I, the blues list is the twelve-bar form, the flamenco list starts with the Andalusian cadence. "Surprise me" rolls across all of them.
2. Choose your key. Everything respells instantly and correctly: in B♭ the flat seventh is A♭, in E it's D natural. Minor patterns stay in minor — picking "E" on a minor progression gives you E minor, not E major with wrong-sounding chords.
3. Press play. The chords sound one per bar at whatever tempo the slider says, and the chip highlights as each one goes past. Tap the loop button and it keeps going while you play along.
4. Read the chord boxes. Every chord in the progression gets a real grip — the open shape if there is one, otherwise the lowest barre form that plays it. If two or three need a barre, the capo panel tells you where to clamp so they don't.
5. Take it with you. Download the PDF chord sheet for the music stand, copy the chords as text, or copy a link that reopens this exact progression for someone else.

Why this chord progression generator is different

Almost every chord generator online is built for a piano or a DAW. They will hand you four chord symbols, sometimes a piano roll, occasionally a MIDI export — and if you play guitar you are then on your own to work out what an E♭m7 actually looks like under your fingers. A few of them make you sign in before you can save what you just made. Three things here that you won't find together anywhere else:

• It answers the guitar question. Every generated progression comes with chord boxes, and every chord box has been machine-checked against the chord it claims to be. If the key is barre-heavy you get the capo position that turns it back into open shapes, worked out with the same logic as our chord transposer.
• It tells you why it works. Each chord carries its roman numeral and its job in the key — tonic, subdominant, dominant, borrowed. The pattern is named, explained in a sentence, and where a famous song runs on the same numbers, it's listed. That's the part most generators charge for.
• Nothing is gated. No account, no email, no paywall on the save. The share link, the PDF chord sheet and the embeddable widget are all free, and the embed carries its own attribution so teachers can drop the whole thing into a lesson page.
• The theory is tested, not asserted. Over ten thousand assertions run on every deploy: the diatonic tables for all twenty-four keys, the named progressions against published chord charts, the capo arithmetic, and every guitar grip against its own chord formula.

How it works (the theory)

A chord progression is not a list of chords, it's a list of numbers. Roman numerals name each chord by which degree of the scale it's built on, which is why the same progression works in every key and why session players can call one out in a bar without writing anything down. Build a triad on each degree of the scale, stacking in thirds, and the qualities fall out of the scale itself:

major scale     0  2  4  5  7  9  11   semitones above the tonic
chords          I  ii iii IV V  vi vii°

natural minor   0  2  3  5  7  8  10
chords          i  ii° III iv v  VI VII

sevenths (major)  Imaj7  ii7  iii7  IVmaj7  V7  vi7  viiø7
sevenths (minor)  i7  iiø7  IIImaj7  iv7  v7  VImaj7  VII7

Three of those chords do most of the work. The tonic (I or i) is home. The subdominant (IV, ii) is the step away from it. The dominant (V, vii°) is the one that creates tension and demands to come home — because it contains the leading tone, the note a half-step below the tonic. Nearly every progression on this page is some arrangement of those three jobs, which is why the tool labels each chord with the job rather than just the numeral.

Two special cases are worth knowing, because they explain most of the chords that sound like they shouldn't fit. A borrowed chord comes from the parallel minor: the ♭VII in Sweet Home Alabama is a B♭ borrowed into D major, and because it removes the leading tone it makes the progression sound loose and riff-like instead of resolved. A secondary dominant is the dominant of some chord other than the tonic — V/ii in C major is A7, which sets up Dm the way G7 sets up C, and its one out-of-key note is what makes a jazz turnaround sound like jazz.

Minor keys get one more adjustment. Natural minor has no leading tone, so its v chord is minor and nothing pulls home. Raise the seventh degree and the v becomes a major V — that is harmonic minor, and it's why the Andalusian cadence ends on a major chord that feels like it belongs to a different key. You can hear the difference by switching between the natural-minor and harmonic-minor cadences in the "Sad and emotional" list above.

The capo maths is simple arithmetic: sounding key = shape key + capo fret. If you want E♭ major and you clamp at the third fret, you play C shapes. The tool searches the first seven frets, but it only offers a position that makes the progression genuinely easier — every chord it asks for has to be an open grip, and at least one barre has to disappear. That is why a progression in C gets no capo suggestion at all: it is already open, and clamping at the third fret would hand you an F♯m. Playback is equal temperament at A4 = 440 Hz, f = 440 × 2^((n−69)/12), the same tuning maths as our note frequency chart.

Theory, not law. These are the patterns that recur in popular music, not rules. If your ear likes a chord that isn't in the key, keep it — half the progressions on this list started as somebody's mistake.

Three progressions worth stealing

The four-chord progression in G. Set the style to Pop, pick the four-chord progression and choose G, and you get G, D, Em, C. Four open shapes, no barre chords, and the same numbers underneath Let It Be and With or Without You. The reason it never gets old is that it never resolves: the last chord is the subdominant, which leans straight back into the first, so the loop has no natural stopping point. If you're still learning the shapes, our guide to guitar chords for beginners covers all four.

The Andalusian cadence in A minor. Switch the style to Flamenco and pick A minor: Am, G, F, E. Notice what the tool does with the last chord — E major, not E minor. That's the harmonic-minor dominant, and the half-step between F and E is the entire reason this sounds Spanish. It's older than every other pattern here by centuries and it still turns up in Hit the Road Jack and Stray Cat Strut.

The 12-bar blues in E. Choose Blues and the key of E, and the generator lays out all twelve bars: four of E7, two of A7, two of E7, then B7, A7, E7, B7. Every chord is a dominant seventh, which classical harmony says should be unbearable and blues treats as the whole point. Play it, hit loop, and improvise over the top — this is the single most useful thing to have running out of a looper pedal while you practise.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most common chord progression?

I–V–vi–IV, by a wide margin. In C that's C, G, Am, F. It appears in so many hit records that a comedy act built an entire routine out of medleying them together. Its rival for the title is the 50s progression, I–vi–IV–V, which is the same set of chords in a different order and sounds completely different because of it. Both are in the Pop list above.

How do I write my own chord progression?

Start with the tonic, end somewhere that either resolves home or leans back to the start, and use the chords of one key until you have a reason not to. The practical method: generate a progression here, play it until you can hear where it wants to go, then swap one chord for another with the same job — a vi for a I, a ii for a IV — and see whether you prefer it. The function labels on each chip tell you which chords are interchangeable.

Which chords sound good together?

Any chords from the same key will sound coherent together, which is why every progression here is diatonic unless it's deliberately borrowing. Beyond that, chords a fourth or fifth apart move most smoothly because they share two of their three notes, and chords a third apart share two notes as well — that's why I–iii–vi–IV glides. Our interactive circle of fifths shows those relationships as a map.

Can I use these chord progressions in my own songs?

Yes. Chord progressions are not copyrightable — courts have consistently held that common harmonic patterns belong to everyone, which is the only reason popular music can exist at all. What's protected is a specific melody, lyric and recording. Take the numbers, write your own tune over them.

Why does the generator change the key when I pick a minor progression?

Because a minor pattern in a major key isn't the same pattern. Picking "E" on the Andalusian cadence gives you E minor, not E major, since the numerals i–VII–VI–V are only meaningful against a minor scale. The hint under the key selector tells you which mode the current pattern is written in, and the result header always names the key you actually got.

Related tools

• Chord Transposer — already have a progression? Move a whole chord sheet into a new key, with capo positions.
• Interactive Circle of Fifths — the map behind all of this: keys, their chords, and how close together they are.
• Chord Identifier — work backwards from a shape on the fretboard to the name of the chord.
• Metronome — practise the progression in time before you record it.
• Browse all free musician's tools by Julian →

Gear for playing your progression

The picks under the result change with what the generator gave you, because the problem changes. Land on a barre-heavy key and the answer is a capo: it's the cheapest thing in any gig bag and it converts seven awkward keys into shapes you already own. Land on a progression you can already play and the limiting factor becomes what you do with it — which is where a looper earns its place, letting you lay the four chords down once and then solo over them for an hour. Between the two, check tuning first: none of the theory on this page survives an out-of-tune guitar, and a clip-on tuner costs less than a set of strings. If you're building a pedalboard around a practice routine, our looper pedal roundup and guitar pedal guide cover the rest of the chain.

Sources & methodology

• Diatonic harmony and roman-numeral convention: triads and sevenths are built by stacking thirds on each degree of the major and natural-minor scales. Numerals are read against the mode's own scale, so in minor III, VI and VII already denote the lowered degrees. Reference: musictheory.net and Wikipedia's Roman numeral analysis.
• Chord spelling uses a one-letter-per-degree algorithm with the accidental derived to match the pitch class, so the ♭VII of B♭ major spells A♭ rather than G♯, and the ♭VII of E major spells D rather than C𝄪.
• Named progressions and their song attributions are cross-checked against the published common-progression and four-chord-song tables at Musicca. The twelve-bar form follows the standard twelve-bar blues and its quick-change variant.
• Guitar grips are held to a self-verifying rule: a shape may not sound one note outside the chord it claims to be, and must carry the root, the third and — on a seventh chord — the seventh. Only the perfect fifth may be omitted, which is why the standard open C7 (x32310) is accepted. Every open shape and every movable form, at every root, is checked on each build.
• Capo positions use the same model as our Chord Transposer — sounding key = open shape key + capo fret, over the open CAGED shapes — cross-checked against Kyser's published capo transposition chart. A position is only shown if every chord it produces is an open grip and it removes at least one barre, so the tool never suggests a capo that makes the progression harder than it already was.
• Playback is equal temperament at A4 = 440 Hz, f = 440 × 2^((n−69)/12).
• All of the above is verified on every build by a fixture test of more than ten thousand assertions covering the diatonic tables for twenty-four keys, every catalogue progression in all twelve keys with and without sevenths, the capo arithmetic, the share-URL round trip and every guitar grip against its own chord formula.

Reviewed by Julian Reyes, MM (Berklee). About Julian · Last reviewed August 17, 2026.

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