4 Chords | Music Videos | The Axis Of Awesome
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters use it as the canonical demonstration that popular songs reuse one chord progression, especially in threads on music analysis and AI-generated music.
What it is
A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2012 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends csl · 2012-06 · on “I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.”
On a related note (corniest pun of the day), the Australian musical comedy act Axis of Awesome made a song called Four Chords Song , which is basically a 47-song medley all using the same chord progression. [LINK] They've said that the chords are used by some of the most well known songs in the world, and their performance demonstrates this nicely, as in this clip: [this video] The above link is the official video; but they explain their reasoning better in this live performance: [LINK]
Recommends jcr · 2013-03 · on “I analyzed the chords to 1300 songs for patterns. Part 3 – Interactive Discovery”
Though a bit more on the "actual implementation" side of things, there's an Australian group called "Axis Of Awesome" who did an interesting song called "Four Chords". It shows the use of a set of four common chords in a lot of different songs. [this video]
Recommends Sharlin · 2022-04 · on “What chords do you need?”
Heh, I just this afternoon listened to a radio show about the famously popular vi-IV-I-V/I-V-vi-IV chord progression [1]. If you haven't heard it before, the "4 Chords" medley by Axis of Awesome is a great demonstration of its ubiquity [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites nanodano · 2016-05 · on “I'm a good engineer but I suck at building stuff”
Another thing I run in to a lot is people saying "I know how to program, but I don't know what to build." There is an amount of creativity involved with programminng. It's like learning how to physically manipulate a guitar and play notes, but saying "I don't know what to play." That happens a lot too, but musicians have the repetoire of other composers to play if they do not want to write their own music (many don't). With programming, recoding something is called reinventing the wheel and that's frowned upon. Ok, sometimes the analogies are forced, but I hope you get it! It's kind of interesting though, because in order to progress we have to build something new, or build on top of what we
Cites samfisher83 · 2017-03 · on “Amper raises $4M to use AI to write music”
Even before machine learning people figured out the chord pattern of most popular songs. You can probably program it use those 4 chords. [this video]
Cites melq · 2018-01 · on “The brains of jazz and classical pianists work differently”
Many genres of music have songs that are mostly comprised of a handful of chord sequences, or 'chord progressions'. For instance, you will hear the I - IV - V all the time in western pop. An example of this (with a different chord progression): [this video] So unexpected harmonies are sequences that don;t fit in to these well-known, 'standard' progressions.
Cites gt2 · 2018-07 · on “What Makes a Hit”
Couldn't those guys' track of success be due to cronyism in the music industry? Their songs are formulaic. I'm sure many of these 2 guys' songs are played in this video that cycles through a long list of hit songs which have the same progression (transposed into the same key so the similarities can more easily be noticed) [this video] So perhaps anyone can write the songs, but not everyone has access to the pop stars (or access to these 2 guys). I'm not an expert song writer myself, but I am a musician and lover of music. Based on the fact that there's awesome music noone's ever heard of or that doesn't get as much play as some lesser quality music, I have to echo the common sentiment that the mu
Cites sammorrowdrums · 2020-08 · on “Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?”
This is a solid answer, but I'd also add - there are very few general music buffs. Maybe I'd count, with years in pro music performance, degree in Jazz and a lifetime of listing to and performing an insanely wide variety of genres... but not a buff for all styles. Computer systems are actually not a bad analogy. How many people do you know that have an in-depth knowledge of Assembly in different systems (including the oldest ones), GPUs, ML, Python, JS, Haskell, C++, Rust, ALGOL, Compilers, Hardware development, etc. Then add into the mix having an in-depth knowledge of the creators of those things, what else they did, failures, influences, their mentors. You always have the choice of breadt