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As the Key Turns ...

My study of 2-5-1 progressions, and of major sevenths in particular, has been so enlightening. I am baffled as to why I never did this before, when I was younger and had a better attention span! Ah well, I'm doing it now, and I'm thankful for the opportunity.

I've spent the last few weeks becoming intimately familiar with major seventh chords. I've done block chord exercises, ascending broken-chord exercises, descending broken-chord exercises, inversion exercises following the circle of fifths, and more. I've made so many little discoveries here and there -- how the second inversion is really just two major thirds a half-step apart, and how the first inversion is really just a minor chord a major third up, plus the root a half-step up. Or how going from a major seventh in the root position to the fourth up in the second position just involves moving the top two notes down a couple of notes.

Funny, as I was typing the above, I thought about how "all this music-theory talk" would have had me in duck-and-cover mode when I was in high school or college. My brain would just shut off whenever it was time to think about music theory. I just wanted to play. I wanted to get to the business of making music, and I didn't want to have to think about the inner workings. That was too hard.

Has my work in the world of major sevenths and 2-5-1 progressions been easy? Not necessarily. Not at all, actually. But nothing worth doing is truly easy, right? Turning a rusted-over key in a rusted-over lock isn't easy, either. And that's what I'm doing: the hard work of truly understanding how these chords work, how they look and feel under my hands, and how they follow various patterns. The more I do this, the more natural it feels to play the inversions and progressions, and the more effortless (yes! effortless!) it is to hop from one chord, or one inversion, to another.

Last night, after I played through my major seventh exercises, I decided to try writing a song that uses nothing but major seventh chords. I came up with this little tune, which is really just a snippet of a tune. It's possible that someone else wrote this tune and I'm just pulling it up from deep within my subconscious; apologies if I'm using copyrighted material!

I also wrote some lyrics for the tune this morning, so who knows ... maybe I'll have a real song on my hands soon!

Anyway, the key continues to turn, and I'm already finding much greater freedom in my playing than I had even a month ago.

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