Ten progressions, one twenty-eight-note line over each, built on the same principle as The Long Way Round: every note labelled with its job against the chord underneath, and a pivot somewhere in every line where a note holds its pitch and changes its meaning. Chord player included so you can hear it rather than trust the labels.
Chord toneDiatonic tensionAltered / chromatic
Sounding—
01
Minor Two Five
Bm7b5 | E7alt | Am7 | Am7
The minor cadence. The half-diminished chord gives you a b5 instead of a 5, and the altered dominant answers it with a b9. Watch the F: it's the b5 of Bm7b5 at the end of bar one, and it's still there at the top of bar two, where it has become the b9 of E7. Same note, entirely different pressure.
The pivot note is F. Play it against both chords back to back and nothing else. That's the lesson in two notes.
G# is the only note in bar two that wants to go up. Everything else falls. It resolves to A.
Bar three deliberately says nothing clever — after that much tension the ear wants plain A minor.
02
Three Chords, Shifting Ground
A7 | D7 | A7 | E7#9
Blues, but tracked properly. G is the b7 of A7 and the 11 of D7. C sharp is the 3rd of A7 and the b7 of... nothing yet. The point is that a small handful of notes keeps changing job while your hands barely move, which is why blues players can say so much with so little.
The C against the C# in bar one is the blue third rubbing against the real one. Bend into it.
F# is the 13 of A7 and the 3rd of D7. Bar two lands on it because the chord finally makes it a home note.
Bar four is the Hendrix chord. The G and the G# are both in it, which is why the #9 sounds like a whole chord's worth of attitude.
03
Substitute
Dm7 | Db7 | Cmaj7 | Cmaj7
Db7 is standing in for G7. It works because the two chords share their 3rd and 7th, swapped over: F and B are in both. So the line barely changes from what it would do over G7, but the bass drops a semitone into the tonic instead of a fifth, and the whole cadence goes sideways.
Play bar two over a G7 instead. Almost every note still fits. That's the substitution, proved.
The G natural is the #11 of Db7 — the note that makes it Lydian dominant rather than a plain V.
F falls to E across the bar line. That's the same resolution a G7 would give you, arriving from a different chord.
04
Back Door
Cmaj7 | Fm7 | Bb7 | Cmaj7
A cadence that arrives from underneath instead of from the fifth. Fm7 and Bb7 both come from C minor, so bar two and three are full of borrowed notes — Ab and Eb sitting in what is otherwise a C major tune. Then Bb7 slides up a whole tone into the tonic and it sounds like coming home through the kitchen.
Ab and Eb are the entire flavour. Neither exists in C major. Play bar two on its own and it sounds like a different tune.
The Ab in bar two is the b3 of Fm7. The same Ab in bar three is the b7 of Bb7. Track it.
The last note of bar three is D — the 3rd of Bb7 and the 9th of Cmaj7. The line arrives before the chord does.
05
One Note, Four Jobs
Amaj7 | F#m7 | Bm7 | E7
C sharp appears in every single bar of this line, and it means something different every time: the 3rd of Amaj7, the 5th of F#m7, the 9th of Bm7, the 13th of E7. It never moves. The harmony moves underneath it. This is the clearest demonstration in the pack that a note has no fixed identity.
Find every C sharp in the tab before you play a note. Seven of them — one in every bar, plus the last note. Say the degree out loud each time.
Because C# is common to all four chords, the progression sounds smooth even though the roots leap about.
The final note is C sharp again, over Amaj7, back to being the 3rd. The line ends where it started, having been four different things.
06
One Root, Four Colours
G7 | G7sus4 | G7#9 | G7alt
The bass never moves. Every bar is a G dominant chord, and every bar sounds different, because the only thing changing is which notes are allowed. Plain mixolydian, then the 3rd replaced by the 4th, then the 3rd joined by a #9, then everything altered at once. Four moods, one root.
Bar two has no B in it. That absence is what suspended means — nothing else changes.
Bar three puts Bb next to B. The #9 is not a wrong note, it's the sound of a dominant with grit in it.
In bar four there is no D at all. Losing the 5th is what makes altered dominants feel unmoored.
07
Lydian Dominant
Gm7 | C7#11 | Fmaj7 | Fmaj7
A dominant chord with a raised 4th and a natural 13 — the sound of the melodic minor scale a fifth above. It functions as a normal V, but it doesn't grind the way an altered dominant does; it floats. The F sharp in bar two is the entire difference, and the line puts it at the top and the bottom so it can't hide.
Play bar two with F natural instead of F sharp. It collapses into an ordinary blues lick. Then put the sharp back.
The natural 13 (A) alongside the #11 is what separates Lydian dominant from altered. Both are in bar two.
Resolution is gentle on purpose. This cadence doesn't need to be dramatic — that's the point of using it.
08
The Connector
Cmaj7 | C#dim7 | Dm7 | G7
A diminished seventh used as a step, not a destination. C#dim7 sits between the tonic and the ii chord purely to move the bass up a semitone. Because a diminished seventh is four minor thirds stacked, the arpeggio is symmetrical — the same shape repeats every three frets, and none of it sounds like it belongs anywhere. That's why it works as a bridge.
Bar two is one arpeggio, straight down. Play it slowly enough to hear that every gap is the same size.
The dim7 has no root motion of its own — it exists to walk C up to D. Play the progression without it and hear what's missing.
Because the shape repeats every three frets, the same bar works three other places on the neck. Try it up at the sixth.
09
Down and Then Home
Dm7 | Cmaj7 | Bbmaj7 | A7alt
Three chords that just walk down the scale, then one that pulls hard. Bars one to three are pure D minor with nothing to resolve — you can wander. Bar four is the only functional chord in the progression, and it does all the work. Useful lesson in how much tension you can save up and spend at once.
The first three bars share almost all their notes. Nothing needs to resolve, so let the phrasing breathe.
The E over Bbmaj7 is a #11. It sounds bright rather than wrong because a major 7 chord can carry it.
Bar four introduces C sharp and Bb — the first notes outside D minor in the whole line. That's what makes the ending feel earned.
10
The Sharp Nine
E7#9 | A7 | E7#9 | B7alt
Hendrix territory, up where the guitar shouts. The #9 chord contains both a major 3rd and a minor 3rd — G sharp and G living in the same chord — which is the entire sound of electric blues compressed into one voicing. The line lives on that pair and keeps hitting it from above.