Chord Progression Generator
Choose a key and a mood, hear the progression immediately, and take it away as a MIDI file. No upload, no account — nothing to sign up for.
Lossless, 16-bit. Larger, but nothing is thrown away.
Each style is a set of progressions that genre actually uses, not random chords.
What it does
A starting point you can actually use
A blank session is a hard place to begin. Four chords that already move somewhere is a much easier one — you can write a melody over it, play it on a guitar, or drop the MIDI into a project and replace the sound with whatever you had in mind.
What this does not do is generate chords at random. Four notes picked from a key are technically valid and almost always musically dead: they do not build tension, they do not resolve, and you throw all of them away. The progressions here are the ones each style genuinely uses — I–V–vi–IV in pop, ii–V–I in jazz, i–VII–VI–VII in the darker end of everything — because those are what listeners have been trained by decades of records to expect.
You get four things at once: the chord names for playing it, the roman numerals so you can move it to any key, audio so you can hear whether it works before committing, and a MIDI file so nothing has to be typed in again.
How it works
How to generate a chord progression
Three choices, then listen.
- 1
Pick a key and a style
Any of the twelve keys, and a style that determines both the mode and the family of progressions it draws from.
- 2
Set the length and the tempo
Four bars for a loop, eight for something with a turnaround. The tempo affects the playback and the exported MIDI.
- 3
Listen, then take the MIDI
Generate again if it is not right — it costs nothing. When it is, download the MIDI or the audio.
What you get
What makes a chord generator worth using
Progressions people actually write, not random ones
Each style is a small set of progressions that genre has used for decades. That is the difference between a starting point and a list of chords that happen to share a key signature.
- technically in key
- goes nowhere
- you discard all of it
- progressions in real use
- resolves properly
- a starting point, not noise
Roman numerals, so it transposes for free
I–V–vi–IV is the same progression in every key. Getting the numerals as well as the names means you can move it to wherever your singer or your session lives without working it out again.
Six styles, each with its own mode
Pop and blues in major, sad, epic and lo-fi in minor, jazz built around ii–V–I. Changing the style changes both the chords and the mood the progression sets.
A MIDI file, not just a picture of chords
Most chord generators show you a diagram. This gives you a .mid you can drag into any DAW, assign any instrument to, and edit note by note.
Who uses it
What it is for
Breaking a blank page
Generate a few, keep the one that suggests something, and write over the top of it.
Practising over changes
A loop in a key you want to work in, at a tempo you can actually play at.
Learning how progressions work
Hearing i–VI–III–VII next to I–V–vi–IV teaches more about mode than any explanation of it.
Sketching before a session
Turn up with a MIDI file rather than a description of what you were thinking.
Writing in an unfamiliar key
If the singer needs E♭, generate in E♭ rather than transposing something in C by hand.
Feeding a generated song
Use the chords as the harmonic idea in a prompt, then generate a full track from the description.
FAQ
Chord progression questions
