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Guide

Progressions

A library of common chord changes that play behind a full rhythm section, so you're locking basslines into real harmonic movement instead of counting bars out over silence.

~5 min read

Knowing where a progression goes and locking into it while a band is moving are two different skills, and most practice tools only train the first one. Progressions is built around the second. Every progression here — a 12-bar blues shuffle, a ii-V-I jazz turnaround, the pop I-V-vi-IV, an Andalusian minor cadence, and more — plays with a real rhythm section behind it, so tracking the changes becomes something your ears and hands do together, not something you count out in your head.

The progression library

Progressions opens on a scrollable list: a key row up top that scrolls through all twelve keys, a Full band/Click toggle next to it, then a stack of cards — one per progression. Each card lays out its chord blocks in order, its genre, and its tempo, and every block is colored by harmonic role — tonic, subdominant, or dominant — instead of just labeled with a letter name. Tap a card's inline play button and the full band starts right there in the list, no need to open the progression first just to hear it. Heart a card and it jumps to the top of the list next time you're back.

Progressions library, key row and Full band/Click toggle at top, chord blocks colored by role, one card's inline play button active
Progressions library, key row and toggle, one card's play button active

Worth knowing: coloring by role instead of by chord name is deliberate. A ii-V-I in G and a ii-V-I in D use different letters but the same underlying shape — subdominant into dominant into tonic. Once you're reading role instead of names, that shape jumps out across every key, which is most of what makes a progression like this worth learning in the first place.

Practicing a progression

Tap into a card and it opens full-screen, one progression at a time. A key row up top lets you transpose without stopping playback. Below it, every chord in the progression sits in a grid with a NOW badge that tracks the live one as the band plays through — chords you've already passed dim out, so your eye stays on what's coming. Under that, a current-chord panel shows a four-string diagram for whatever chord is live, plus its name and Roman numeral (a handful of jazzier voicings fall back to name-only when there's no cataloged diagram for that exact shape). A rhythm strip suggests a down/up picking pattern for the feel — straight eighths for most progressions, a quarter-note pulse for the swung ones — and a scale-to-practice panel toggles between the progression's matching scale (blues for the 12-bar, natural minor for the minor cadences, major for the rest) and its relative pentatonic, mapped across the neck if you'd rather solo over the changes than play them straight. Tempo and swing controls stay within reach the whole time — swing only shows up on the progressions that actually swing.

Progression practice screen, 12-bar blues, NOW badge active mid-chord, current-chord diagram and rhythm strip visible
Progression practice screen, 12-bar blues, NOW badge active

Build your own

If the library doesn't have the change you're after, build it. A Build a progression entry sits right in the list, above the bundled cards — tap it and pick chords, stack them in the order you want, set a tempo, and save. A custom progression isn't a lesser copy of the bundled ones: it plays with the same full-band backing and transposes with the key row exactly like anything already in the library.

Anything you build shows up in its own Your progressions section above the bundled list, with an edit/delete menu in place of the heart the bundled cards use. Delete asks you to confirm first — hand-built progressions don't have a Recently Deleted safety net the way songs and ideas do, so once it's gone, it's gone.

Build-a-progression sheet, chords stacked, tempo set
Build-a-progression sheet, chords stacked, tempo set

Full band or just a click

Every progression, bundled or your own, plays two ways: the full drums/bass/keys arrangement, or a plain metronome click with the chords still advancing on schedule. The band's reference bass line is there so you can hear exactly where the root sits under each chord while the changes are still new — it's a guide, not something you're meant to double. Switch to Click once you don't need that anymore, and you're the only bass in the room.

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