Learning to play guitar can seem a bit challenging, but did you know you can play millions of songs with just four easy guitar chords? Yes you can, absolutely!

With 4 simple guitar chords you can play songs from any genre like pop, rock, campfire or 60’s songs. Choose your pick.

4 Chords for Most Songs

The 4 chords, 4 chord progression and 4 chord songs are related to the 80/20 principle. It means that 20% of causes / input (20% of all chords and progressions) leads to 80% of results / output (80% of the songs). The 80/20 principle, als called the Pareto principle, can be applied to all things in life, and for guitar playing we can see it in learning 4 chord songs.

There are a few basic chords that you need to learn. With those basic chords you can build the most common 4-chord-progressions to play almost any song you want.

4 Chord Progressions

You can build a 4 chord progression from the notes of the major scale or natural minor scale. In music we use roman numerals to indicate the order of chords in a chord progression. Let’s take the chords built of the C Major scale for example – The key of C:

I = C Major
ii = D minor
iii = E minor
IV = F Major
V = G Major
vi = A minor
vii = Bdim.

Now one of the most common 4 chord progression is I – V – vi – IV ( 1 – 5 – 6 – 4 ) If we follow the numeral numbers in the key of C we end up with the chord progression: C – G – Am – F. You can follow this chord progression throughout the whole song.