Writing songs on guitar?

Question:How do I come up with an amazing chord progression that is both original (enough) and sounds amazing?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: How do I come up with an amazing chord progression that is both original (enough) and sounds amazing?

It really helps to know which chords belong to a key. For example in C major, the basic chords are: C Dm Em F G Am Bdim.
G7 usually substitutes for Bdim.
You can transpose this to other keys.

Play around with all or some of these chords and start to break some of the rules. You can replace major with minor, or visa-versa, or force in a completely outside chord, maybe even a "made up" one.

You don't want it to sound amazingly BAD, I presume, so it has to have some basis in theory, or some similarity to something else. You can take a song and swap major with minor, or reverse some of the order, or mix ideas from 2 songs together and then change the groove.

If you know how to extend chords into 9ths, suspensions, etc, you can try that.

Another idea is to first come up with a great simple riff. Each note of the riff can be substituted by any chord that includes it. It will take patience to select which chords you finally use out of all the possibilities.

Use these ideas to come up with about 20 candidates for your amazing progression. Then see why you like some better than others, and polish them.

If this isn't natural to you, then I'd strongly suggest taking a course in music theory. You learn about chords, types, and progressions in it. It would generally be very helpful to your song-writing.

I had the same problem, easiest way to get some pretty decent chords and progressions is to sit there for like hours playing until you find one that works.
Good Luck

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I'm with John M on this one, he pretty much covered it all. If you don't want to sound like everyone else try throwing in some diminished and suspended chords, they just add a little something extra, and stay away from progressions with C D A and G in any order, if you use those it's almost guaranteed that someone else has written that song.

If you knew a bit more about music theory you would know that you are looking for something impossible to do.

I remember a number of years ago when a famous Music Conservatory offered a FREE, complete 4 year course to ANYONE who could compose and submit merely 5 MEASURES of music that had never been written or played... EVER...

They didn't give away any courses.

If you want to write music then you need to understand how it is composed... you can't just hop in and string a bunch of notes together because it just doesn't work that way... there are certain protocols and formulas for music composition and just banging a few notes together is not among them