How to write a chord progression

Let’s say you’ve learned a couple of chords on the piano, guitar, or any other instrument, and now you would like to write your own song. But you have no clue where to start. Well, a great way to start is to come up with a good solid chord progression.

In order to write a basic chord progression, we need to look at which chords go well with each other and why. We then need to establish how long our progression is going to be in terms of how many measures and how often we change chords. And then we need to choose which parts of our progression are going to be “stable” chords and which will be “unstable”.

A little knowledge of music theory is not required, but it’s definitely useful, so if you’re into reading more about music theory, check out my article “Music Theory 101”.

Chord degrees

Most songs are written in a single key, and in every key, there are certain chords that work every time within that scale. For instance, in the scale of C major, we’ve got the notes C D E F G A B that we can create a melody with. The chords that will automatically fit with this scale are C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, and Bm(♭5).

Guitar Diagrams

The low E string is always on the left and the high E string is on the right. The X means that you don’t play that string. So in the case of D minor (Dm), you’ve got to mute the E and A string.

C triad on the piano

For all of the keyboard players out there: if you want to play a plain C chord, you start with the C, then skip a note to get to the E, then skip one key again so you’ll get to the G. When all three pressed together you’ve got yourself the C chord, and we also call this a “triad” in music theory language.

Playing other triads

Then if you move all three notes together, one note to the right, you now get your Dm chord. If you keep this up with all of the white keys in C and leave one key in between each time, you will get: C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bm(♭5).

Instead of naming each chord by its name, musicians often also call them by Roman numerals: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. Sometimes even with the minor symbol attached to it: I, IIm, IIIm, IV, V, VIm, VIIm(♭5). This might not sound relevant now, but it is going to be very useful when we are going to change the key later on.

dominant

One of the most important first lessons about degrees is the V chord (the “five” chord). When you play in any key and get to the V chord, it naturally wants to resolve to the I (the root) chord. So the V chord is commonly referred to as the “dominant” (remember this term because it will be very useful in your learning journey).

The circle of fifths

There are 12 notes in total and they are best explained by looking at a piano keyboard. There we have 7 white keys and 5 black keys. We call the distance between each key a semitone, and if there is a key in between, we call it a tone or a whole tone.

So when we only play the white keys, we get the C major scale and we find ourselves with this pattern of whole tones and semitones:

w w s w w w s

So now let’s give all of the notes of the C major scale a number:

C
D
E
F
G
A
B

When we “go up a fifth” from C we get to the G. So now let’s apply our "WWSWWWS formula” again, but this time starting from the G. You’ll see that we will play different keys this time around.

Notice how we’ve not introduced our first black key? We call this note F sharp and we use the symbol of a hashtag # for it. The key of G has 1 sharp and it’s the F sharp.

The purpose of this article isn’t to go around through the entire circle of fifths. That would become a little bit too long of an article. But I hope you get an impression of what it does.

If you want, you can continue this pattern: find the fifth note of the G major scale (D). Then apply the WWSWWWS formula starting from the D. You will then get D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#.

You’ll then have two sharps. The next key will become A major and you will find three sharps there, and with the next key of E, you’ll get 4 sharps, etc.

But let’s get back to our G major scale and now apply our knowledge of the triads. If you play G, B, and D, you’ll get a G major triad chord. If you move up like this through the scale, you’ll get the following chords:

G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em, F#m(♭5)

Notice how our D minor chord from the scale of C has changed to a D major chord? That’s all because of the F#.

Measures

With most of the theoretical harmony stuff out of the way, let’s get creative! A great way to ignite your creativity is to set some boundaries for yourself. This may sound counterintuitive, but it’s actually true.

One way of setting boundaries for myself while writing a song is to put some measures on a piece of paper like this:

Set boundaries for yourself to inspire yourself

The way I do this is by writing a set amount of bars on the paper before I do anything else. I try to not make this too big or too small. 8 bars is often a nice middle-of-the-road number.

I then decide on which key I’ll be writing in, and for the sake of this article not getting too extremely long, I’ll be picking C to keep it easy to follow. So that gives us the following chords: C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bm(♭5)

Well, now comes the question: which chords should you pick? You can think long or short about it, but it doesn’t matter. There are only six to choose from so might as well do it quickly.

Version1: One chord for each bar

One method of writing a chord chard is to do one chord for each bar. This is a completely fine method, but for the sake of this article, I want to change it up a bit. Sometimes within a song, it can be exciting to play with the duration of chords. So let’s make some chords last for two bars, while others keep changing every bar.

Version 2: “2-1-1” structure

Since I chose to write a song in C, it is quite logical to start with the C. And we get two whole bars of C to firmly establish this tonal center. But is it necessary to start on “the I” chord of the scale? No of course not! So let’s add some more variety in the next version.

Version 3: Starting on “the V”

I’ve swapped the first two bars of C with G. This is the fifth chord of the C scale, so this throws the listener off guard a bit more. It also gives us the illusion that the song might be in G because the Am chord is also in the scale of G. It is only when you get to the Dm chord that you realise that you are in fact in C.

Version 4: Borrowing from another key

In version 3 I was explaining about “fooling” the listener into thinking that we are in a G major chord progression, but in fact, we are thinking about it as the V chord of C. But what if we actually capitalised a little bit more on that ambiguity by changing the last D minor chord to a D major chord. We’re now “borrowing” for 1 single bar from the G scale.
Or you could flip it around and say that the entire song is actually in G and the single bar of Dm is the only one that’s in C. It doesn’t really matter. It’s fun to play with this single changing note: F to F#.

Final Thoughts:

Of course, this is not the only method of writing a chord progression. This is just one way of doing it. And I hope that seeing a little bit of this process will help you to start writing your own songs.

Because that’s what this website is all about. Helping you further on your music journey!

How to write a chord progression

How to write a chord progression

Chord degrees

dominant

The circle of fifths

w w s w w w s

Measures

Final Thoughts:

FAQ: