Watch Axis of Awesome perform 4 Chords: One chord progression, 36 songs

The Axis of Awesome’s song “4 Chords”, a medley of 36 pop songs that all contain the same basic chord structure, received airplay on BBC Radio 1. This airplay drove listeners to the internet and “4 Chords” went viral, receiving millions of hits on YouTube.  The musicians in Axis of Awesome not only have an interesting concept for this song, but they also have excellent voices for it – demonstrating lots of vocal range and style to stay true to the individual songs that are all mashed up together in this video.

What Axis of Awesome is pointing to, is a basic chord progression based on the first, then fifth, then sixth, then fourth tones of the scale of the song, written as: I V vi IV.  Namely, in C: C major, F major, G major, and A minor chords.  These four chords happen to be the most popular chords used in pop music. There are not many different orders you can play 4 chords in, considering that you usually want to start on the I chord, so the likelihood of using this particular combination of chords in a song is high.

If you are a beginning pianist or guitarist who would like to be able to play something you can sing along to, it may be a good project to learn these 4 chords and try out the songs that go along to them.  There is an even longer list of songs using the I, V, vi, & IV chords (not always in the same order) here.

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