Progressions
A library of common chord progressions that play with a full live band behind them, so you're practicing chord changes in time with real drums, bass, and keys instead of switching shapes in silence.
Knowing a chord and playing it in time are two different skills, and most practice tools only train the first one. Progressions is built around the second. Every progression here — 12-bar blues, a ii-V-I jazz turnaround, the pop I-V-vi-IV, doo-wop changes, and more — plays with a full band behind it, so changing chords becomes something you do to a groove, not something you do into silence.
The progression library
Progressions opens on a list of cards, one per progression. Each card shows its chord blocks in order, its genre, and its tempo, and each block is colored by harmonic function — tonic, subdominant, or dominant — rather than just labeled with a chord name. Tap the inline play button on any card and a live band preview starts right there in the list, no need to open the progression first just to hear what it sounds like.
There are forty-one of them, sorted into packs: Classics, Pop, Rock, Folk & Country, Blues & Jazz, Soul & R&B, Dreamy, Sad & Moody, and Reggae & Latin. The filter row above the list narrows it to one pack at a time. It's the quickest way in when you know the feeling you're after but not the name of the progression that gets you there.
Coloring by function instead of by chord name is deliberate. A ii-V-I in G and a ii-V-I in D use different chord names but the same underlying shape — subdominant to dominant to tonic. Once you're reading function instead of letters, that shape is easy to spot across every key, which is most of what makes progressions like this useful to learn in the first place.
Practicing a progression
Tap into a progression and it opens full-screen, focused on that one progression and nothing else. A NOW badge tracks the live chord as the band plays through it, alongside a fingering diagram for whatever chord is current, a suggested strum pattern, and a scale-to-solo-over diagram if you want to noodle over the changes instead of just playing them straight. Tempo and swing controls sit within reach the whole time, so you can slow a fast turnaround down or add swing to a blues without leaving the screen.
Same chords, a different groove
The groove behind a progression isn't fixed. A row of grooves sits on the practice screen — the same set Jam uses — and picking a different one re-feels the whole band without touching the chords. A ii-V-I can walk in swing or sit back in half-time. A blues can stop shuffling and go straight. The changes stay exactly where they were; everything underneath them moves.
It's worth doing on purpose rather than idly. A progression you know cold in one groove has a way of falling apart in another, and finding out which ones those are is most of the value. On progressions you've built yourself the choice sticks, so a custom one always comes back the way you meant it.
Build your own
If the library doesn't have the progression you're after, build it. Pick chords, stack them in the order you want, set a tempo, and save it. A custom progression isn't a lesser copy of the bundled ones — it plays with the same full-band backing, and it transposes with the key selector exactly like anything already in the library.
The builder leads with the chords that actually live in your key, in labeled rows. In a major key that's the seven that belong there, then borrowed chords, then secondary dominants; flip the palette to minor and it's the seven in-key chords plus a Spice row — V7, ♭II, IV, vii°. Each one carries its Roman numeral — uppercase for the major chords, lowercase for the minor — so the shape of the key stays visible while you work. The full root-and-quality picker is still underneath if you want a chord from outside it.
Chords don't have to take one bar each, either. Tap a chord you've added and you can set it to hang for one, two, or four bars, up to sixteen bars total. Most songs move that way — sitting on the tonic for two bars before anything happens — and a loop built one-chord-per-bar rarely sounds like the song you had in mind.
Full band or just a click
Every progression, bundled or your own, can play two ways: the full drums/bass/keys arrangement, or a plain metronome click with the chords still advancing on schedule. The band is there to give you something to lock into while the changes are still new. The click strips that away and leaves just the timing — worth switching to once the band's help isn't what you need anymore.
