How to write chord progressions: a beginner's guide with interactive examples

A chord progression is a short sequence of chords, usually four, that repeats under your melody and carries the emotion of a track. You write one by picking a key, building simple three-note chords from the notes that key hands you, then putting three or four of them in a row. That’s the whole job. You don’t need to read sheet music or memorize anything, and by the end of this guide you’ll have written one.

What is a chord, and what is a chord progression?

A chord is three or more notes played at the same time. Play them one after another and you get a progression: the block of harmony that loops under everything else in your beat. The melody is the single-note line on top that you hum. The chords are the cushion underneath it. Get the cushion right and almost any melody sitting on it will sound like it belongs.

Nearly every chord you’ll start with is a triad, which just means three notes. Learn to build one triad and you can build all of them, because they’re all the same shape moved to different starting notes.

How do you build a chord?

Build a triad by stacking three notes: a root, a third, and a fifth. The root is the note you start on and the one that names the chord. From there you count in half steps, where a half step is the very next key (black or white) and a whole step is two keys:

• The fifth is always seven half steps above the root.
• The third is the note in the middle, and it comes in two flavors. A major third is four half steps above the root. A minor third is three.

That middle note is the whole story. Stack root, major third, fifth and you get a major chord, which sounds bright and open. Move that middle note down one key to a minor third and you get a minor chord, which sounds darker and more serious. Same root, same fifth, one note different.

This is C major (C, E, G) followed by C minor (C, E flat, G). Only the middle note changes, and you can hear the mood flip:

That one moved note is the single most useful thing to understand about chords. Bright or dark lives in the third.

How does the key tell you which chords to use?

The key does the hard work so you don’t have to count half steps for every chord. A key is a set of seven notes that sound good together, and picking one before you write is what stops your progression from sounding random. The two keys to start with are major (brighter) and minor (moodier), and each is built from a fixed pattern of whole (W) and half (H) steps starting from any note:

• Major scale: W W H W W W H
• Minor scale: W H W W H W W

Start on C and walk the major pattern and you land on all the white keys: C, D, E, F, G, A, B. That’s C major, the friendliest key to learn in because there are no sharps or flats to trip on.

Now the part that makes chords stop feeling scary. Once you’re in a key, you build a chord by stacking every other note of the scale: root, skip one, third, skip one, fifth. You don’t decide whether it’s major or minor. The key decides for you. Do it on C and you get a major chord. Do the same skip-one stack starting on D and you get a minor chord, because of where the scale’s notes fall.

These are the first four chords of C major, each built by that same skip-one stack. Notice they alternate major and minor on their own:

That’s C major, D minor, E minor, F major. You never chose the quality. You just stacked notes from the key and it came out right. This is why staying in a key is such a shortcut: any chord you build from its notes is guaranteed to fit.

How do you turn chords into a progression?

Turn chords into a progression by picking three or four of them from your key and setting them in a row, usually one chord per bar or one every half bar over a four-bar loop. There’s no single correct order. Some orders just feel better than others, and you find them by ear.

To talk about which chords you’re using, producers number them 1 to 7 by their position in the scale. The chord built on the first note is the 1 chord, the second note gives the 2 chord, and so on. You’ll also see them written as Roman numerals, with capitals for the major ones (I, IV, V) and lowercase for the minor ones (ii, iii, vi). You don’t have to use that shorthand, but it’s handy: once you know a progression is “1, 6, 4, 5,” you can play it in any key.

That gives us a first progression in C major: the 1, 6, 4, and 5 chords, which is C, A minor, F, G. It’s one of the most-used progressions in all of pop for a reason:

That’s a real chord progression, written from scratch, using nothing but “stack notes from the key.” Loop it, hum over it, and you’ve started a song.

How do you make plain chords sound fuller?

Plain triads sound a little boxed-in on purpose here, because I stacked every one in root position (root on the bottom) so you could see the construction clearly. In a real track you’d voice them: change which octave each note sits in, so the chords ring wider and flow smoothly into each other instead of jumping around. Voicing is the difference between a progression that sounds like a beginner exercise and one that sounds like a record, and it’s the natural next step once chord-building clicks. I wrote a full interactive walkthrough of it in how to make a chord progression sound better. Learn the chords here, then open them up there.

Which chord progressions sound happy, sad, or dark?

Different orders of chords carry different emotions, and you can aim at a mood on purpose once you know a few go-to shapes. The trick is that most feeling comes from whether you’re in a major or minor key and whether the movement rises or falls. Rising, major movement lifts. Falling, minor movement pulls down. Here are four moods with their number formula and a real example you can play:

Mood	Key	Numbers	Example chords
Bright, uplifting	A minor	6, 7, 1, 3	F, G, A minor, C
Sad, longing	A minor	1, 7, 4, 6	A minor, G, D minor, F
Dark, serious	A minor	1, 4, 5, 1 (all minor)	A minor, D minor, E minor, A minor
Happy, simple	C major	1, 6, 4, 5	C, A minor, F, G

A minor uses the same white keys as C major (it’s the relative minor), so all of these stay easy to play. Play the bright, uplifting one, F, G, A minor, C. It climbs, which is most of why it feels good:

The sad, longing one is A minor, G, D minor, F. Same key, but the mostly-downward motion and the minor chords pull the mood the other way:

The dark, serious one is all minor chords: A minor, D minor, E minor, back to A minor. Nothing brightens it, so it stays heavy and cinematic:

Three different feelings, the same handful of notes, only the order and the major/minor mix changed. That’s the entire emotional toolkit in miniature. Start collecting these shapes by ear, and over time you’ll remember which one gives you which feeling. For a deeper dive into moody progressions, see dark chord progressions, and to understand which chords belong to a key and which you can borrow from outside it, diatonic and borrowed chords.

Where do you go from here?

You now know the whole loop: pick a key, stack notes into triads, put three or four in a row, and lean major or minor to steer the mood. The two next moves are voicing the chords so they sound full, covered in the voicing guide, and writing a memorable melody to sit on top of them, which uses the exact same key you already chose.

If you’d rather hear a strong progression before you build one, Songen has a chord progression builder that suggests the next chord as you go and generates a full editable loop in any of 50+ styles from the progression you make. Because it’s MIDI, every note is yours to change, so you can drop in a progression, then re-voice it and swap chords with everything you just learned. It’s the fastest way to get a musical starting point on screen instead of a blank grid.