Free chord progression generator
Choose a key, choose a progression, press Play. You will see the name of each chord and the notes inside it, and one sentence about why these chords sound good in this order. You do not need to read music for any of it.
Why this works
A chord is three or more notes played together. The simplest kind takes a note of the scale, skips one, takes the next, skips one, and takes the next: the first, third and fifth. Do that starting from each note of a key and you get the seven chords of that key. Some come out sounding bright, which we call major, and some wistful, which we call minor.
It starts at home, moves to the chord that most wants to go back home, sidesteps to the sad cousin of home instead, and then takes one more step before returning. Tension, surprise, and release, in four bars. Hundreds of hit songs use exactly these four chords in exactly this order.
C, G, A minor, F and G, D, E minor, C are the same progression in two different keys: 1, 5, 6, 4. Once you hear progressions as numbers you can play any song in any key, and you start recognising the same few shapes in almost everything you listen to.
The bass usually plays the note each chord is named after, called the root. That one low note tells your ear which chord it is hearing. Try the walking and octave styles to hear how a bass can move while still saying the same thing.
Yes. It runs in your browser with no account, and you can download what you make as a WAV.
Yes. Chord progressions are not owned by anyone. The ones here have been shared by songwriters for a very long time, and thousands of different songs use the same ones.
Each number is a position in the key. In C major, 1 is the chord built on C, 4 is built on F, 5 on G and 6 on A. Writing chords as numbers means the same progression works in every key.
If you sing, choose the one that feels comfortable for your voice. Otherwise pick by mood: major keys sound bright, minor keys sound wistful, dorian is minor with a little lift, and mixolydian is major with a little grit.
A form twelve bars long built from three chords: four bars on the 1, two on the 4, two back on the 1, then the 5, the 4 and two more bars of the 1. Pick Twelve bar blues in a major, mixolydian, minor or dorian key to hear it, and switch on Sevenths to turn every chord into the dominant seventh that blues players use.
It stacks one more note on top of every chord, the seventh note counted from its root. Three note chords sound plain and certain. Four note chords sound richer and a little unresolved, which is the sound of jazz, soul and lo-fi.
The studio has this and everything around it: instruments, recipe blocks, an arranger, and a co-producer that explains every change it makes. Free to start, private until you share.