Play Thousands of Songs Using These Guitar Chord Progressions

Did you know there are a handful of common guitar chord progressions that are repeatedly used throughout hundreds of songs?

If you’ve spent much time on YouTube, you might be familiar with the Axis of Awesome. In their popular video, the Axis of Awesome performs a compilation of around 50 songs in under six minutes, all while using the same guitar chord progression.

The video is very entertaining as it creatively reveals a secret that professional musicians have known for decades.

Guitar Chord Progressions to Play Thousands of Songs

Although most popular songs are based on just a handful of guitar chord progressions, sometimes the chords are modified (adding a 7th or 9th for example).

They can also be played in a different order, or using different instruments and grooves. So to the untrained ear it may be hard to detect the same underlying chord structure.

Once you understand how the most common guitar chord progressions work, it will open the door for you to play thousands of songs easily. Let’s start by learning about some of the most basic guitar chords.

5 Basic Guitar Chords

If you’re just getting started on the guitar, you’ll want to learn a few basic chords first. The chord charts below show five of the most common open chords. Open chords are chords where some of the strings are played “open”, without holding down any of the frets.

To read the chord charts, imagine that the top line of the chart is the nut, where the neck of the guitar meets the headstock. Each of the six vertical lines represent a guitar string, with the low E string at the far left and high E at the far right.

Each horizontal line represents a different fret on the fretboard. The numbers along the bottom of the chart let you know which finger on your left hand should fret each string. Your left hand fingers are numbered one through four, starting with your index finger.

For example, to play the A chord as pictured above, hold down the D string with your middle finger on the second fret, the G string with your ring finger on the second fret, and the B string with your pinkie finger on the second fret.

Now, strum from the A string down. The X at the top of the diagram indicates that you should not strum the low E string.

Understanding Guitar Chord Progressions

A chord progression is a pattern of usually three or four chords that is repeated throughout a song. Some songs use a couple different guitar chord progressions, switching back and forth for the verse and the chorus.

You might find other songs that use a single chord progression the whole way through.

Many musicians use what is known as the Nashville System to talk about chord progressions. For example, let’s look at the common chord progression C-F-G, also known as I-IV-V in C.

On the Nashville number system, each note in the scale is given a number one through seven, written as a Roman numeral. The root note of the scale is I. In our example, C is I, the root note. F is the fourth note in the scale, IV, and G is the fifth, V.

The Nashville system encourages musicians to focus more on the relationships between notes rather than the notes themselves. This is particularly helpful if you are playing with a singer or another musician and they ask you to change the key you are playing.

Rather than scrambling to transpose the song, using your familiarity with the relationships between guitar notes, you can quickly and easily switch keys.

I-IV-V Chord Progressions

Common guitar chord progressions like G-C-D, A-D-E, and E-A-B are all examples of the I-IV-V chord progression in action. So the next time you are looking at a song and you see one of these sequences, you will know you are looking at a I-IV-V chord progression.

The I-IV-V chord progression forms the foundations of countless classic songs and contemporary favorites. According to Ultimate Guitar, the I-IV-V progression, with slight variations, can be used to play the following songs:

• “Imagine” by John Lennon or “Everybody Talks” by Neon Trees (I-IV)
• “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers or “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” from “Cheers” (I-V)