In this instructional video, Lauren Bateman teaches beginners how to play a vast repertoire of popular songs using only four basic chords—G, E minor, C, and D—by applying five essential chord progressions. She introduces the concept of chord progressions, explains Roman‑numeral notation within the key of G major, and demonstrates each progression with strumming patterns and real‑world song examples (e.g., The Beatles’ “Let It Be,” U2’s “With or Without You,” The Cranberries’ “Zombie,” Sweet Home Alabama, Hound Dog, and “Stand By Me”). The progressions covered are: the ubiquitous pop I–V–vi–IV pattern, the emotional pop‑rock vi–IV–I–V pattern, the classic I–IV–V three‑chord progression, the 12‑bar blues structure, and the 1950s I–vi–IV–V progression. Throughout, Lauren emphasizes how variations in strumming, rhythm, and instrumentation can dramatically change a song’s feel, even when the underlying chords stay the same. She also promotes her 7‑Level Guitar System, a step‑by‑step curriculum aimed at older adult beginners, encouraging viewers to enroll for a structured learning path.
Chapters
If you learn just these 5 chord progressions I'm going to show you in today's lesson, you will be able to play hundreds, if not thousands, of songs. Stuff like this. And you'll be able to play things that sound very, very musical, and you really don't need a lot of chords to do it. Let's start step by step. So first things first, what is a chord progression, right? So it's, it's a vocabulary term that we use in music, and it's just the order, it's the pattern in which you are going to play your chords. All right, so a lot of songs have very repetitive chord progressions. Okay, that's why there aren't very many chord progressions in music, or why you might hear a song on the radio and you think it's one song, but then the melody starts and it's actually a different song. All right, so we're very limited in the number of chord progressions we have because we only have so many chords. So what I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you 4 chords that we're going to use for this entire video that will allow you to play hundreds, if not thousands, of songs, which is 4 chords. All right, so in my 7-Level Guitar System, I start people off with 2-finger chords. I'm going to use the 3-finger version here, um, but they are the G chord, the E minor chord, the C chord, and the D chord. If you want to go learn the 2-finger versions, I do have a video right up there that shows you those 4 chords. But I'm going to play G, E minor, C, and D. That's all we're going to need. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put Roman numerals on screen. So this is a little bit of music theory, but I'm not going to dive into it too much. Each one of these Roman numerals represents a chord in the major key we're going to work in, which is going to be G major. Okay, so this is the key. A key, very simply, is a group of chords that sound really good together. It's like a family of chords that sound good together. All right, and the ones we're going to be using are G, E minor, C, and D. So our G chord is our I chord. It's our home chord. It's the chord that when we end a song, we feel like we're done. Okay, so that is going to be our I chord. Our IV chord is going to be a C chord. Our D chord is going to be a V, and these are all going to be uppercase Roman numerals because they are major chords. We're going to also work with a lowercase vi, which is going to represent our minor chord, E minor. So think big Roman numerals, major chords, small Roman numerals, minor chords. All right, so we have the I, IV, V, VI chord, okay? And that's G, C, D, E minor. So when you see these little Roman numerals, they're not confusing as we go through each example. All right, so the first example is we're gonna do what we call the pup chord progression, which is going to be I, V, VI, IV, or that would be G, D, E minor, C, okay? So G, D, E minor, C, it would sound like this. Let's put a strumming pattern behind it.
Let's go 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Okay, this is what it's going to sound like.
1, 2, 3, 4.
And a couple songs that I wrote down that use, um, this pop progression, there are so many, but for example, Let It Be by the Beatles, okay? With or Without You by U2, which I actually just did a video on that song, great song. And it's just a very, very common chord progression that you will hear in a lot of pop music. And essentially, you know, what you can do to kind of change the vibe of these is just use different strumming patterns. So for example, in a song like With or Without You, you know, you could maybe do all down Very, very different feel than what we were just doing, right? So that's the thing, we're limited by the number of chord progressions, but we're not limited by the melody, the instrumentation, the way we play the chords. So there's a lot of variation that you can do, and that's why sometimes when, you know, you play a song and you don't have the entire band with you, it might not quite sound like the song just yet. Um, because the chord progression by itself is just very simple. Um, the next one is going to be the, the emotional, uh, pop rock chord progression, uh, used in a lot of 2000-era songs. Think of Someone Like You, Apologize, um, kind of more modern, um, pop rock songs. So it's going to be an E minor chord. We work— the progression is going to be 6-4-1-5.
So we got E minor, C G, D.
I think of the song Zombie when I hear this. It's like that emotional pop rock. Yeah, so this is a— I mean, that's what I— when I hear that, I'm like, that's the chord progression for Zombie by the Cranberries. Uh, again, very, very popular chord progression. And again, that's more of like a rock style, but you could spice up, make it a little more singer-songwriter by just strumming. So in this chord progression, we're starting on a minor chord versus a major chord on the last one. So like the first chord progression sounds very like happy and bright, where at this chord progression, it's almost like there's a darkness right from the first chord. It creates a lot of dark emotional intensity. There's a lot of tension, um, in this chord progression. But again, very popular one, very, very cool one. All right, and then we kind of have like the classic 1-4-5 chord progression, um, used in a lot of songs. I think like Sweet Home Alabama, Um, you know, but it's a lot of blues, country, early rock, tons of classic rock songs. Actually, I just played Sweet Home Alabama, and that's 5-4-1, but, but same chords. But we have D, C, and then G. Okay, so you kind of got this, um, Same thing, using, using the 1, 4, and 5 chords in music is, is very, very common. Um, it's a great chord progression for beginners because it's all major chords, all right? It's only 3 chords, so it's less, less to memorize. Um, but you can also put in like a little shuffle rhythm with it to be bluesy with it. Kind of has an old school country feel. If you put like a little boom chuck pattern behind it, um, so there's lots of fun things you can, you can do with these patterns. The next is going to be the typical classic 12-bar blues. All right, so this is a bit of a longer progression because there are 12 bars. Um, in a bar in music, it's a measure, just, it's a section of music. And for 12-bar blues, there are 12 sections that we call measures, and each one of those is represented by a chord. So in the key of G, which we are playing in, it would be, uh, the I chord for 4 measures: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.
Then we'd have the C chord for 2 measures: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Back to the G chord: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 for 2 measures.
And then the last 4 has the most movement. We've got the D chord followed by the C chord and then a double G. Okay, so if I put this together and I put it to like a bluesy shuffle—
1, a 2, a 3, a 4, a 1, a 2, a 3, a 4.
I think this is actually Hound Dog. I think this is the chord progression for Hound Dog. And then the last measure, we got a D, C, a G. So this is a great structure for jamming in the blues if you want to, um, jam with friends. A lot of rock music, um, I think of Elvis Presley's Hound Dog, which is actually in the key of C. It's not in the key of G, so it's different chords, but it's the same progression. That's the cool thing about the progression, and that's why we use the Roman numerals, is because when we go to change keys to play different sets of chords, we know which ones to play. So I know if I want to switch this to the key of C, instead of playing the chords G, C, and D, I'm now going to play C, F, and G. So it'll sound like—
ain't nothing but a—
so it's the same chord progression, just a different set of chords, um, but it works. And, and speaking of like that music, we have like the kind of the '50s chord progression. Um, think of like Earth Angel. Um, Stand By Me is another example that I wrote here. Um, for Stand By Me, you can just put— it's in a different key, but if you put a capo on the 2nd fret, you can play Stand By Me. So it's going to be, um, the chord progression for this is going to be 1, 6, 4, 5. So we've got G, E minor, C, D. All right, so you can see, hey, it sounds like Stand By Me. Okay, all I did was put a capo on the guitar. If you want to go learn that, I do have a video right up there that you can go check out. But it's, um, it's a very nostalgic song and it's very circular, so you kind of just keep doing the same thing over and over again, especially for Stand By Me. Um, and you just keep repeating that, which is great because it makes it great for beginners because you don't have to worry about the chord progression changing a lot. So earlier I mentioned Let It Be, but it may have one chord progression for the verse and a different chord progression for the chorus, which a song like Stand By Me doesn't. It sticks with the same chord progression for the entire song, which makes it great for beginners. Hopefully this lesson showed you how accessible music can be with just with just 4 chords and a few simple chord progressions, and you literally can play hundreds if not thousands of songs on your guitar. And if you're someone who has been trying to learn on your own here on YouTube and you're finding it, you know, frustrating going from a lesson to lesson, I highly recommend you go check out my 7-Level Guitar System where I teach you stuff like this in the lessons. We move step by step, so this way you're going from one video into the next video. Because when this video is done, YouTube's going to recommend a bunch of videos, and you don't even know if that is the right skill level for where you're at with your learning. That's the tricky part with YouTube. So if you're someone who prefers a method, learning things in a step-by-step system in a way that is designed for beginners, especially older adults— most of my students are over the age of 50, so I specialize in teaching beginner older adults how to have fun and play songs like Stand By Me or Let It Be on the guitar. So if that sounds like you, I highly recommend going to the link in the description below checking out my 7-Level Guitar System. It has helped thousands of students have fun playing their guitar. I'd love to help you make your dream of playing the guitar come true, so go check that out in the link in the description below.
