In: 4
It’s not the chords that are always the same, it’s the chord progression. The relationship between the four chords. If you listen to a lot of these songs compared to the real ones, they’re in a completely different key, it’s just that the rise and fall between the major chords is the same. Plus, the percussion and melody and vocals are different as well.
the I, V, vi and IV chords of a major key. The roman numerals represent the numbers of the major scale we begin a chord from (1, 5, 6, 4) so in C major this would be C, G, Amin, F or in G major it would be G, D, Emin, C.
A lot of popular songs have similar chord progressions because they sound nice to our ears, follow a familiar pattern, and are easily looped. Even if the chord progression is the same, there’s a lot of other things that can be different—the melody, the tempo, the key, the instrumentation, and so on.
Some examples of popular chord progressions:
* The most common pop chord progression is Major 1st -> Major 5th -> Minor 6th -> Major 4th. e.g., [Don’t Stop Believin’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k8craCGpgs)
* An inverse of the above is Minor 6th -> Major 4th -> Major 1st -> Major 5th. e.g., [Hall of Fame](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kxf2dHlDpQ)
* The 1950s progression, so called due to its prevalence in early pop music, is Major 1st -> Minor 6th -> Major 4th -> Major 5th. e.g., [Heart and Soul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOXl4mp_QKE)
I love the Axis of Awesome 4 chords song! It’s fascinating how they manage to blend so many different songs with just four chords
The chords they use are G, D, Em, and C
Definitely check out their performance, it’s mind-blowing!
1. There are a LOT of popular songs. Even if music generally used chords at random there’d be a lot of songs that used the same ones.
2. Songs don’t use chords at random. In the same way that some colours look good together in an outfit, some chords sound good when used near each other and in certain orders. That includes structure too, like using 4 chords in a verse or a chorus is something that just ‘sounds good’ in pop music and so it’s very common.
3. Common influence. If song A is popular, the writers of song B and song C might incorporate elements of it. And then the writers of songs D and E incorporate elements of those. There are many elements to be influenced from. It’s useful to recognise that chord progression is one element that transfers really well across genres, over time, different instrumentation etc. So popular chord progressions tend to proliferate, especially within a subset of music like ‘popular western songs in the last 50 years’. Sometimes that re-use is a conscious choice, sometimes it’s unconscious.
4. Familiarity is an influence on popularity. This is kind of the same as the above point but from the listener’s point of view rather than the writer’s. When I hear a song that sounds like something I’ve previously liked, there’s a good chance I like the new one too.
5. The original 4 chords aren’t necessarily all exactly the same as the ones used in the video. ‘Transposing’ or ‘changing the key’ of a song means taking the starting point of it, for example in C, and instead starting it at another pitch, for example in G. What the ear hooks into often is the ‘interval’ from one chord to a next; for example if you hear a C followed by an Am, then some time later you hear a G followed by an Em, those two progressions will sound very similar – because the interval from C-Am is the same as the interval from G-Em. This means if I write a song using Am, F, C and G, and you write a song using Em, C, G and D, someone can play those two songs using my Am progression or your Em progression by transposing one of them. That’s what’s happening in the video, it’s not quite ‘all of these songs have the same four chords’, it’s ‘all of these songs have the same progression of intervals and we’ve transposed some of them to put them in a common key’.
It’s like how many different baseball teams play the same game at different stadiums. All these teams playing this game go from first, to second, to third, to home. While they do it at different stadiums, or with different teams, it’s always the same general formula.
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