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.
- 01
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.
- 02
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.
- 03
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
No, and that is deliberate. Each style holds a handful of progressions that genre really uses, and one is chosen from that set. Genuinely random chords stay inside the key and still sound like nothing — they do not create tension or release, which is the entire job a progression does.
No — you get chord names, roman numerals, audio and MIDI, not fingering diagrams. For a guitarist that is usually enough: the names are standard, so any chord chart or app will give you the shapes. Shapes are also instrument-specific in a way the progression itself is not.
They number the chords by their position in the key rather than by name. I is the home chord, V is the fifth degree, vi is the sixth in minor — lowercase means a minor chord. Written this way, one progression covers all twelve keys: I–V–vi–IV is C–G–Am–F in C and G–D–Em–C in G.
Yes. Chord progressions are not copyrightable — I–V–vi–IV appears in hundreds of hit records and nobody owns it. What is protected is a specific recording and a specific melody, neither of which this gives you.
Drag it into any DAW — Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, Reaper, GarageBand — and it becomes editable notes on a track. Assign a piano, a pad, a guitar; change the voicings; move a chord. It is a normal standard MIDI file with no restrictions.
It is a simple synthesised tone, on purpose. The playback exists so you can judge whether the progression works, not to be the final sound — that is what the MIDI export is for. A convincing piano sample would mean loading megabytes of audio into the page.
Not yet — the chords come out as straightforward triads with the root doubled an octave up. Sevenths, inversions and open voicings are the obvious next step in a DAW, and they are two minutes of work once the MIDI is in front of you.
Mode and vocabulary. Pop and blues are major; sad, epic and lo-fi are minor; jazz is major but built around ii–V–I motion. Generating the same key in two styles is the quickest way to hear what the label actually means.
Yes. No account, no credits, and no limit on how many progressions you generate. Everything runs in your browser.
Not directly from the MIDI — but you can describe the mood and the chords in a prompt and generate a complete track from it. That is what the rest of this site does.
