Guide to 3 Note ii-V-I Chord Progressions on the Piano
We're just going to go over the very basics of two-five-one progressions, which is the foundation of jazz. Most songs are based off this progression. We're going to do our first two-five-one progression in the key of C, so it's going to include a D minor seventh chord as the two chord. And the five chord is G seven, and the one chord is going to be a C major seven. So what we're going to do is take the D minor seven first and we're going to simplify this to only play the root in the left hand. So the root is just the base note of the chord. Since it's a D minor chord, we're going to play a D in the left hand. And in the right hand, we're only going to play the third of the chord and the seventh of the chord. And to figure out the notes of the chord, you can just count up from D. So one, two, three, so there's our third. And seventh is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So these are our two notes we're going to play with it. And if- when you put the D in the base, you'll hear that sound, which is the D minor seven, and then the easiest way to go to the five chord is just lowering the seventh down a half-step, and that's always going to be the case. So if you lower the seventh down a half-step, and now we're playing a G in the base, that's our G seven chord. And if you noticed here, we're playing third and seventh of the G, as well. So let's do that again, D minor seven, G seven. And now we're going to take the seventh of the G and bring it down a half-step, and now we're going to be the third and seventh of C major seven. So there's C major seven. So let's do that all at once. D minor seven. There's our third. There's our seventh. Moving to G seven. This time, the third and seven are flip-flopped. There's our seventh. There's our third. If you want to see. There's the seventh, third are just flip-flopped. Now going to the C major seventh, just bring that seven down a half-step and a C in the base, and here's our third and here's our seventh.