Your first step in mastering this relationship should be to aurally and mentally ingrain this intervalic relationship around the circle.Ī useful exercise is to visualize the root movement around the cycle in every key.

This is because it’s the same as V7 to I movement ( but more on this later). This root movement by perfect fourth has an inherent sense of forward motion and a feeling of arrival or resolution. And it goes back to the symmetrical relationships found in the circle of 4ths: You’ll find this relationship in pop tunes, nursery rhymes, Broadway musicals, symphonic works, and countless jazz standards. Harmonic movement by a perfect fourth – moving from I to IV or modulating to the key of the IV chord – is a fundamental part of music. Let’s get started… The I to IV relationship We’ll dig into the theory behind this relationship, show you some important tunes that use it, check out some lines from great improvisers, and give you a blueprint for developing your own techniques to master this progression. If you look at the big picture, there are a handful of important chord progressions that pop up over and over again…Īnd today we’re going to focus on one of them: t he movement from I to IV. Lucky for us, the jazz repertoire isn’t comprised of random sequences of chords that change with every tune. And if your goal is to play better solos, you need to start focusing on specific chord progressions and mastering them one by one. You see, improvement isn’t about piling on more information – it’s about mastering the information that you already have. Unfortunately all of this time and effort didn’t transform me into the next John Coltrane. I actually believed that something magical was going to happen to my playing when I memorized 100 tunes! …and truth be told, this is something that took me a long time to understand.įor years I thought that memorizing more chords, more progressions, and more tunes would change the way I improvised. Only so many chord symbols and progressions you can force into your brain… After a certain point you actually need to learn how to play over these sounds. When it comes to improving as an improviser, there are only so many tunes you can memorize.

Georgia on my mind chord progression