Tuesday Foundations: Cycle of Fifths Chord Progressions

Now that I have graduated from the four courses on seventh chords, I'm in the "Play Piano Lead Sheets with 7th Chords" course. The first lesson is on the Cycle of Fifths chord progression. I'm very familiar with the Cycle of Fifths, so I guess I'm a little ahead there. And thanks to the seventh-chord courses, I'm pretty good at moving from one chord to another, even when using different inversions. So I'm thankful for that.

As I work my way through these lessons, I'm going to spend a lot of time transposing to other keys, using only the roman numerals as a guide. I also want to practice using the many skills I'm learning in the blues course: slides, turns, harmony notes, rolls, etc.

Another goal: Avoid falling into my stale old habit of arpeggiating the left-hand chords. Use block chords, or stride/ballad-style chords, or bass lines, or ... well, anything but those broken chords! Broken chords are pretty and nice and I don't have anything against them, other than that's my default style, and I desperately want to break free of it. I don't want to throw it away entirely; I just want to stop being dependent on it.

In this video, I talk (and play) through some of the things I'm learning. I'm not ready to perform anything yet, but it might be interesting later to see how far I've come from this humble beginning.

(Note: This is a back-post; I wrote the post and made the video on Thursday, but I've set it up to post the previous Tuesday since Tuesday is my day to focus on Foundations.)

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