Progressions
The turnaround, in every key
A turnaround is the handful of bars that stop a tune from ending — the loop that hands you back to bar one still wanting to play. This page holds the common one, fingered so your hand barely moves, with a band to take it round in any key you pick.
Four bars that hand you back to the top
A chorus runs out before the tune does. You reach the last bars, the melody has landed, and something has to carry you back to the beginning without letting the music sit down — otherwise every chorus ends in a small full stop. The turnaround is the standard piece of carpentry for that job, and the commonest one is the ii–V–I with a fourth chord added and the order rearranged: I, VI7, ii7, V7. In C that reads Cmaj7, A7, Dm7, G7.
You have already heard it more than any other four bars in jazz. It is the last two bars of a blues chorus; it is bars 7 to 10 of a jazz blues, where the I7 is followed by exactly this VI7, ii7 and V7; and the A section of rhythm changes is essentially this progression three times through at two chords to the bar, with the second pass starting on the iii instead of the I. Learn these four bars and a surprising amount of the repertoire turns out to be them.
The chord that closes the circle
Three of the four chords are the ones the key hands you. The sixth degree is the exception. Built from the scale it would be a minor chord — in C, Am7 — and the turnaround makes it dominant instead: A7. One note changes, the third, and it is the only note in the whole progression that the key signature does not contain. In C that note is C♯.
It is worth the intrusion because of where a dominant chord points. A seventh chord leans on the chord a fourth above it, which means A7 leans on Dm7 — the ii chord, the next bar. The V7 at the end leans the same way onto the I at the start. So the four bars contain two chords that are each pointing at what follows them, one of them across the seam, and that is what makes the loop circular instead of final. Borrowing a dominant to point at a chord that is not the tonic is a secondary dominant, and turning the vi into a VI7 is the first move that article makes.
The voicings, voice-led
Here is the turnaround on the top four strings, one drop-2 voicing per chord — the inversions that sit nearest one another rather than the textbook grips. In every key the four of them fit inside five frets, and they follow the key you pick:
Watch the joins, because this loop is the smoothest of the four on this site: no voice anywhere in it travels more than three semitones, seam included. From Cmaj7 to A7 only two fingers move at all. The E and the G stay exactly where they are — they were the third and fifth of the I chord and they become the fifth and flat seventh of the VI7 without shifting a fret. The root rises a half step to become the new third (C to C♯), which is that borrowed note arriving, and the major seventh drops a whole step onto the new root (B to A). The chord changes character completely and the hand barely acknowledges it.
Then comes the one join in the loop where nothing holds. Going from A7 to Dm7 all four voices step up, and it is the largest move on the page. That is the reset: everything the previous two changes let fall gets carried back up, so the last two bars can spend it again. Those last two bars are the ii–V–I's own two joins, note for note — two voices holding while the other two fall, each chord's seventh dropping a half step onto the next chord's third (C to B, then F to E). Letting each voice take its shortest path like this is voice leading, and the pair that does the leaning in every one of these chords is the third and the seventh: the guide tones.
Start in C and three of these four shapes have been on this site before. The Cmaj7, Dm7 and G7 are exactly the drop-2 side of the CAGED article's ii–V–I, and its G7 — F, B, D, G — is the top four strings of an E-shape barre chord with the doubled notes left off. One caution if you go comparing: the chain is chosen for the whole loop, seam included, so adding a fourth chord can pull the other three to different inversions than the ii–V–I page finds on its own. In seven of the twelve keys it does.
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
Four bars at this tempo is under eight seconds, which makes the turnaround the shortest useful practice loop there is: it comes back before you have finished thinking about it. Walking bass, swung ride, hi-hat on 2 and 4, and the four voicings above comped on top:
Listen to the bass rather than the chords for a chorus or two. After the first move it walks a cycle of fourths — each root a fourth above the last, three times over, and the third of those lands you back on the tonic. That is the strongest root motion in tonal music, and hearing it come round is most of why the loop feels pulled forward rather than pushed.
Where you start is a choice
Now count bar one two bars later. The same music, the same four voicings in the same order, but read from the third bar it is Dm7, G7, Cmaj7, A7 — a ii–V–I with one chord after it, pushing off again. Nothing has been transposed, revoiced or retimed; only the downbeat moved:
Which one is "the" progression depends entirely on the tune. A phrase that ends on the tonic and needs carrying home meets these bars as I–VI–ii–V. A vamp that keeps arriving meets them as ii–V–I–VI. Players name them separately and practise them separately, and they are one loop with two doors. It is also the plainest answer to why a ii–V–I so often refuses to feel finished: put a VI7 after it and it was never a cadence in the first place, it was a turnaround caught mid-circle.
Take it around the keys
Pick any key above and everything follows — the chart re-spells, the four shapes re-finger to the nearest window, and the band walks the new roots. Because the loop is short, this is the progression to be most ruthless about owning in all twelve. Start where the tunes are: B♭ and E♭, the horn keys where rhythm changes and most blues heads live, then F, then C and G.
A workable drill, and it uses the loop's own shape: play two times round in one key, then move up a fourth and play two more, following the selector leftward around the circle. That is the same root motion the turnaround already makes three times per chorus, so the change of key arrives sounding like one more bar rather than an interruption. Say the chord names as they pass, and watch the two frets that refuse to move at the first change. The window travels; the logic does not.
Where Drop2 comes in
The Drop2 app drills the vocabulary this page comps with. Learn lays out all four inversions of six seventh-chord qualities on three string sets — the full map these four shapes are picked from — and Train calls a voicing and listens through the microphone to whether you found it.
Play-Along, part of Premium, is the band above with the guitar chair empty, and it carries both of this page's loops as forms of their own: Turnaround and ii–V–I–VI. Running the two back to back in one key, at one tempo, is the whole point of this page made into a practice session. Lines, also part of Premium, plays the same forms 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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