Progressions
The minor ii–V–i, in every key
A minor key has its own cadence, and it is nearly the one you already know: change two of the three chords and the whole thing turns dark. This page holds it — the chart, the fingerings, and a band that loops them in any key you pick.
Two chords change, and the key turns
In C major the ii–V–I is Dm7, G7, Cmaj7. In C minor it is Dm7♭5, G7, Cm7. The jobs are unchanged — a chord that leans, a chord that pulls, a chord that lands — and so is the middle chord. What moves is three notes.
Every note the minor key lowers lands in the outer two chords: the ii gives up its fifth, the i gives up its third and its seventh. The V refuses. That B in the middle of G7 is the one note in the cadence the minor key signature would pull down to B♭, and keeping it raised is the whole point — flatten it and the chord becomes Gm7, which leans nowhere. A dominant chord is what a minor key borrows in order to have somewhere to go home from.
The chord you have not played
The half-diminished is the one quality most guitarists arrive without. Written m7♭5, or ø, it is a minor seventh chord with its fifth flattened: D, F, A♭, C — root, ♭3, ♭5, ♭7. It is not a diminished seventh, which flattens the seventh as well and belongs to a different sound entirely; the ø is a minor chord with one note pulled down, and it turns up on the second degree of every minor key.
Two things make it easier to hold onto. Its ♭5 is nothing exotic — in C minor that A♭ is simply the sixth degree of the key, the note that makes the key minor in the first place. And the same four notes, spelled upward from the F, make Fm6, the minor iv chord, which is why arrangers swap the two without thinking about it. One shape, two names, depending on which note the bass is playing.
The voicings, voice-led
Here is the cadence on the top four strings, one drop-2 voicing per chord — the inversions that sit nearest each other rather than the textbook grips. All three sit inside one hand position, five frets end to end at most, and they follow the key you pick:
Watch the joins. Dm7♭5 to G7 is two fingers moving one fret each: the F and the D stay exactly where they are while the C drops to B and the A♭ drops to G. That is not a lucky accident of these grips. The ø chord and the V7 above it always share two notes — the ø's root and ♭3 are the V's fifth and seventh — and the other two always fall a half step, the ♭5 onto the V's root and the ♭7 onto its third. Wherever you play this move on the neck, and in whatever key, it is the same four-note event.
The join into Cm7 is where the minor key shows its hand. The leading tone — the B in G7, the note that made the whole chord pull — cannot stay, because the tonic chord has a flat seventh exactly where that note was. So it moves a half step: down onto the seventh of the i chord or up onto its root, whichever is nearer to where your hand already is. In the major cadence it does not have to move at all; it simply becomes the seventh of the tonic chord and holds. A minor key asks for the leading tone on the way in and takes it back on landing. The pair doing the leaning in each chord, here as everywhere, is the third and the seventh: the guide tones, and letting each of them take its shortest path is voice leading.
Start in C minor and the G7 in the middle is a grip you may already own: F, B, D, G, with the root on top. Those are the four notes the CAGED article lifts off the top of an E-shape barre chord — the shape a rock player has played for years, minus the two strings that were only doubling.
Every sound on this page is the Drop2 app's own sampled guitar, bass, and drums — from the MuseScore General sound library, used under the MIT license.
Loop it with the band
Three bars is a short trip, which is what makes it worth looping: the cadence comes around often enough that you stop counting it and start hearing it. The loop below is the app's Play-Along band — walking bass, swung ride, hi-hat on 2 and 4 — with the three voicings above comped on top:
Two things to listen for. The bass steps into each new chord from a half step below, so the changes arrive walked into rather than switched. And the middle bar is the only place in the loop where a note from outside the key sounds — that raised B — which is why the third bar reads as an arrival instead of just the next chord along.
Where the cadence actually lives
On its own the minor ii–V–i is a practice object. In the repertoire it sits at the end of forms, and the plainest example is the minor blues: four bars on the i — no quick change to the iv in bar 2, which is a major-blues habit that minor mostly skips — then two bars on the iv, two back home, and bars 9, 10 and 11 on exactly the three chords above. Same band, same key, same tempo:
The voicings are not the ones on the cards, and that is the lesson. The chain is chosen for the whole twelve bars, so after eight bars around Cm7 and Fm7 the hand is already sitting high on the neck and the cadence gets played where it stands. The chords are the same three; the grips are whichever ones are nearest. What survives the move is the join — in these voicings too, the D and the F hold while the A♭ and the C fall a half step into G7.
Take it around the keys
Pick any key above and the whole page follows: the chart re-spells, the three shapes re-finger to the nearest window, and the band walks the new roots. Start where the tunes are — C minor (Blue Bossa, Softly as in a Morning Sunrise), D minor (Alone Together, Beautiful Love), G minor (the cadence that keeps coming round in Autumn Leaves: Am7♭5, D7, Gm7), A minor (Summertime, on most nights), B♭ minor (Nica's Dream). The sharp keys look exotic on the selector and arrive the first time a singer wants a tune a half step lower.
A workable drill: loop one key until the ø chord stops sounding like a wrong note and starts sounding like the beginning of a sentence, then move up a fourth — C, F, B♭, E♭ minor — which is the direction the chords themselves keep travelling. Say the names as they pass, and watch the two frets that hold at each change. The window moves; the logic does not.
Where Drop2 comes in
The Drop2 app teaches the vocabulary this page comps with. Learn shows all four inversions of six seventh-chord qualities on three string sets — the half-diminished among them, which for most players is the missing one — and Train calls a voicing and listens, through the microphone, to whether you found it.
Play-Along, part of Premium, is a band like the one above with the guitar chair empty. It has no bare minor ii–V–i to loop: what it has is the minor blues you just heard, with the cadence in bars 9 to 11 — which is where you will meet it in a tune in any case. Lines, also part of Premium, runs that same form for soloing and names the guide tone to aim at in each bar.
Free to start, no time limit · Works with acoustic and electric guitar
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