This lesson is for beginning guitarists looking for an easy way to learn a lot of songs quickly. There are loads of exceptions to these guidelines, but we're not trying for a comprehensive collection of chord progressions here. Instead, we'll be using the 80/20 rule (the Pareto Principle - 20% of your work yields 80% of your results) and looking at the 4 most common chord progressions used in thousands of songs.

Once you have these basic progressions under your fingers, you'll find it simple to adapt them to one of the exceptions. Maybe a couple of the chords are flipped, or it starts in the middle.

The General Purpose Progression

In any key, the I, IV, and V chords (e.g. C, F, and G) are called the Primary Chords and they'll form the bulk of many progressions. So, your first progression is any combination of those chords:

C, F - "Everybody Talks" by Neon Trees.

C, G - "The Gambler" by Kenny Rodgers.

C, F, G, C - "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt.

C, G, F, C - "All the Small Things" by Blink-182 or "Born This Way" by Lady Gaga.

C, F, C, G, C - A basic 12-bar blues.

The Pop Progression

This next chord progression is probably the most overused in all of pop music.

C, G, Am, F - "Someone Like You" by Adele, and countless other songs.

There is a common variation of this one that goes Am, F, C, G. It's exactly the same progression, but starting from the Am and going around the progression - "Grenade" by Bruno Mars.

The Jazz Progression

A zillion jazz standards are built around this progression.

Dm, G, C - "Autumn Leaves" by everybody.

The 1950's Progression

This chord progression and its variant were well used in the 1940's and 1950's for both ballad and uptempo songs.

C, Am, Dm, G - "Fool on the Hill" by The Beatles.

C, Am, F, G - "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen or "Poor Little Fool" by Ricky Nelson.

The only difference between these two progressions is the Dm (in the first) and the F (in the second). Dm and F share two of the same notes (F and A) making them common substitutions for one another.