What Are Common Chord Progressions?

We're going to talk about common chord patterns, specifically for guitarists. When I first learned about common chord patterns, it gave me a huge boost in my ability to learn songs faster. It really helped my songwriting abilities. These days I find this to be a great tool for students as well. 

Common chord patterns are short chord progressions. Most of the time you’ll only use three or four chords. Being able to recognize these patterns will help you learn the songs much faster. You’re also practicing chord changes how they’re most often used.

A Little Music Theory

We’re going to start out with just a little bit of music theory: the Major Scale.

Let’s use the C Major scale, it’s the easiest one to memorize. Start at C, and work your way up the alphabet.

C-D-E-F-G-A-B

And then we’d start back with C and keep going. We can number each of those notes in relation to the scale (1 through 7).

• C is 1
• D is 2
• E is 3
• F is 4
• G is 5
• A is 6
• B is 7

This is how we talk about the notes. When we’re talking about chords in a scale, we change to roman numerals. These are incredibly common in music. Here’s what the chords would look like (and yes, each note also represents a chord in the key!):

• C is I
• D is ii
• E is iii
• F is IV
• G is V
• A is vi
• B is viiº

Are you wondering why some are lowercase and some are uppercase? The upper case are Major chords, and the lowercase are minor chords. The seventh chord is a little different, in that it’s a diminished chord. But we won’t worry about that right now.

To make any chord in the key, start on the note you want, we’ll say C. Every Major and minor chord has three notes. So we’ll need two more notes to make our chords.

Start with C and skip over one note to get the second note in your chord (skip over the D and you’ll land on the E), then skip over another note to get your third note in the chord (skip over the F and you’ll land on the G). With C, E, and G you have a C Major chord. For the D, you’d have D, G, and A for a D minor chord.

That’s all there is to it! These chords are called diatonic chords. That just means they’re made up strictly of notes in the scale and you haven’t borrowed from other scales.

Using our roman numerals, here is how every chord naturally falls:

• C (or I) - Major
• D (or ii) - minor
• E (or iii) - minor
• F (or IV) - Major
• G (or V) - Major
• A (or vi) - minor
• B (or viiº) - minor (diminished)

Diminished chords don’t show up much in popular music, so we’ll skip it for now. The chords were going to be dealing with are 1 through 6. And in the case of the key of C, that's going to be three major chords and 3 minor chords. 

Many, many, many progressions are built with these six chords. You can pretty much choose any three or four of these chords and play them together. They’ll sound OK and make sense to your ears. They’re used to it.

When writing your progression, a good rule of thumb is to end it on the 4 (IV) or 5 (V) chord. The chords tend to pull to the root chord. They create enough tension that resolves on the root (I) chord. The 5 (V) chord especially pulls very strongly to the I chord.

You’ll see what I mean! I’m going to switch to mostly roman numerals now, with chords listed as examples to tie it together. That way, you can take these ideas into any key. 

And I’ll use terminology like “that’s a I-IV-V pattern”. What I’m saying is that the progression uses the I chord, then the IV chord, then the V chord.

The most common chords used for popular music are the I chord, the IV chord, and the V chord. If you want to extend that you can add the vi chord (more on that in a bit). Most of popular music will be built off these three or four chords.