Creating Chord Progressions That Always Work, in Any Key

Noodling with chords can help create songwriting ideas. But how do you do this effectively?

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If  your songs are all sounding the same, you may find that you’re starting them all the same way. Generally speaking, how you start a song will often determine how a song ends up sounding. So it’s important to experiment with various ways to get the songwriting process going. Melody first, chords first, lyrics first, rhythm first… and so on. If you find that you’re going through a bit of a rough time creatively, and you just can’t seem to come up with songwriting ideas, noodling around with chords can help create some musical fragments that will finally get your song started.

But with literally hundreds of chords to choose from, what do you do? Fortunately there’s an easy way to get those hundreds narrowed down to a smaller handful of chords that all work together:

1. Choose a key. Ideally, your song is going to be in a key that makes the most sense for singing the vocal line. But since music is easily transposable, don’t worry too much about this. Choose a key that’s easy to play.
2. Create a chord list from your chosen key. Every key has seven chords that occur naturally. They’re the chords that are built on each note of the major or minor scale. If your chosen key is C major, the seven chords will be: C Dm Em F G Am Bdim.
3. Start on the tonic (key) chord. Not all progressions start on the tonic chord, but for the purposes of generating songwriting ideas it serves as a good starting point.
4. After the tonic chord, follow it with… anything. This is important to remember: there is a logic behind how chord progressions work. But once you’ve played a tonic chord, you can leap to pretty much any chord in your list of seven chords.
5. After your second chord, most adjacent chords in a progression should have roots a 4th or 5th apart. A good estimate would be to have 70% or more of the chords in your progression moving to the next one by the interval of a 4th or 5th.
6. Consider the authentic cadence (V-I) or a plagal cadence (IV-I) to be a solid way to end a progression. So as you work through your improvised progressions, aiming for one of those cadences as an ending point gives your chords a solid foundation.

Those six steps can keep your chord progression improvisations from being a totally random process. By using those 6 steps, I came up with the following progressions:

1. C  Am  Em  Am  Dm  G  C.
2. C  F  Dm  G  Em  Am  Dm  G  C
3. C  G  Dm  Am  Dm  F  C
4. C  Em  Am  Dm  G  F  C
5. C  Dm  C  F  Dm  G  C

Those are very basic progressions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re boring. One of the best things you can do for your song is to create progressions that “stay out of the way”, and just work. But if you’re looking to add a few interesting chords to the mix, try the following:

1. Modal mixtures. A modal mixture means that you’re going to “borrow,” so to speak, a chord that would normally come from the opposite mode. We know, for example that an F chord in C major is a major chord. So try using Fm. It has a pleasantly nostalgic sound. Example: C  F  Dm  Am  F  Fm  C
2. Secondary dominants. To create a secondary dominant, look for a minor chord followed by a major chord, where the root of the major chord is a 4th higher (or 5th lower) than the minor chord. Then simply turn the minor chord into a major one. Example: In the progression Dm  G  C, you can turn the Dm into a secondary dominant by making it major. So the progression becomes: D  G  C.
3. Other altered chords. An altered chord is one that doesn’t normally come from the chosen key. Other than modal mixtures and secondary dominant, other standard favourites are the flat-VI, the flat-VII, and the flat-III. So try adding some of those into your progressions. Example: C  Eb  F  C, and C  F  Am  Ab  G  F  C.

What keeps a progression from sounding random is the predominance of root movements of 4ths and 5ths. So as you improvise, it’s often best to avoid progressions using chords whose roots move up or down by step.

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Written by Gary Ewer, from “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” website.
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