I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been writing a chord progression when I suddenly hit that wall. I’ll have three chords that sound great—and perfectly fit the song idea in my head—but for the life of me I can’t seem to find the right chord to go next. In today’s blog we’ll dive right into this problem and you’ll learn a very handy technique for finishing those chord progressions.

The first three chords

We’re going to assume you’ve started writing a progression, and have two or three chords together. Maybe these fit a melody you’re singing, something your bandmate is playing, or maybe you just like the sound of them as they are. Either way, you’re almost there. For this article, we’ll pick a few chords as an example, but you’ll be able to follow along with lots of other progressions too. The chords we’ll use are G, Bm and A. Here’s what that sounds like (repeated twice, with a blank space where our new chord will go):

Break them down

Chords tend to sound good together if they’re all in the same key. There are all sorts of keys (major, minor, etc.), but you don’t really need to know that stuff for now. All you need to know is that a key is a set of (usually 7) notes that sound good together. We’re going to pull the notes out of each chord in our progression (remember, that was G major, B minor and A major) and then see what other chords we can build with them. Here are the notes that make up each of our chords:

G major  –  G B D

B minor  –  B D F♯

A major  –  A C♯ E

Now we’ll combine all those notes, remove any repeated ones, and put them in order:

G   A   B   C♯   D   E   F♯

Get all the chords

This scale has a name (it’s a mode called G Lydian), but again, this stuff doesn’t really matter for what we’re doing. What we’re going to do next is look at all the chords we can make with these notes. The three basic chord types—major, minor, diminished—have a simple “1–3–5” relationship, which works like this:

1. Pick any note, call it “1”
2. Count up two notes in the scale to “3”
3. Count up two more notes to “5” (wrap around to the beginning if you run out of notes)
4. These three notes make your chord!

Let’s see how that looks with the G chord. We start counting at G… two notes up is B… and then two more is D. That’s G, B, D—or G major—which is exactly what we’d expect.

G   A   B   C♯   D   E   F♯

We can do this for every chord in the key. To determine if the chord we made is major, minor, or diminished, you look at the intervals between each note. A chord with the notes G B D is major because G to B is 2 steps and B to D is 1.5 steps; minor has the opposite relationship (e.g., the B D and F♯ in our Bm chord); diminished has 1.5 steps between each pair of adjacent notes (e.g., C♯ E G). Alright, here’s what we get if we pull out all seven chords:

G B D  –  G major

A C♯ E  –  A major

B D F♯  –  B minor

C♯ E G  –  C♯ diminished

D F♯ A  –  D major

E G B  –  E minor

F♯ A C♯  –  F♯ minor

Altogether, here are the chords in our key:

G   A   Bm   C♯°   D   Em   F♯m

Getting the last chord

Time to get that last chord! Since we now know the chords in our key, we can start trying out some options. Nice. Let’s assume that for this song we don’t want to repeat any of our first three chords. That leaves us with four great options to try. Here’s how they all sound.

Progression with C♯°

Progression with D

Progression with Em

Progression with F♯m

The progression we choose is a personal decision—which do you like the most? We may even decide to keep looking beyond these four, and consider seventh chords, chords outside the key, or something else. That said, my personal favourite is the chord progression with F♯m, as it fits the melody that was in my head when I brought together the first three chords. I’ll throw in that melody on synth and add in some bass, drums, and keys. Here’s what we get:

Cool eh? This is applied music theory—it’s the music theory that puts you and your ideas in the driver’s seat. Want to learn more? Check out our article “Let’s write a song the fast way” and our very special music theory app, Waay, that’s all about music theory for songwriting, with its interactive exercises, bite-sized video lessons, and progress tracking tools.

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