The 11th to 7th Chord Cycle | Pro Chords Only 4 Fingers

It's always better if you can do more with less. This is especially true with chord progressions. The primary goal is to sound good at the piano. This 11th to 7th Chord Cycle is an excellent tool that you can interject or use as a transition to a target chord.

Also, these aren't dense chords. In other words, you only need 4 fingers total to play them. So let me give you this fun and easy chord cycle.

We're going to utilize the circle of 5ths. If you're familiar with it, you know that that it's a geometrical representation of keys, chords, intervals, progressions, etc. In other words, it represents many musical elements.

We're going to focus on our 11th to 7th chord cycle by moving counter-clockwise around the circle of 5ths. To be specific, we'll be moving in 4th intervals because that's the way chords are inclined to move.

We'll start with a C11 chord.

A C Major chord consists of the root, 3rd and 5th tones.The flatted 7th tone is located a half step below the 7th tone. By adding it, you have a C7 chord.In order to transform this C7 chord to a C11, the 3rd is often omitted because it clashes with the 4th (which is referred to as the 11th when a 7th is present).

Instead of playing the C11 in root position, we'll play a voicing of it which is simply rearranging the tones. We'll also omit the 5th to open up the chord. This is referred to as an open voicing and sounds much more satisfying.By playing this 11th chord, your ear will tell you that there's a tension within it that needs to be resolved. That's because the 11th is a suspended tone not unlike those you find in sus (or suspended) chords.

We'll resolve our C11 to the C7 chord. All we need to do is move the 11th down a half step to the 3rd (E) and then we have C7. You'll hear the resolution when you play this chord.We want to continue our 11th to 7th chord cycle the smoothest way possible. And as I said before, we're proceeding around the circle of 5ths counter-clockwise. So the next chord is F11. It has the same tones as the C11 we played earlier but a different voicing.

Continuing on with the cycle, we lower the 11th down a half step to the 3rd which transitions the chord to F7.Where would our 11th to 7th chord cycle transition to next? If you know the circle of 5ths (or if you look counter-clockwise on the circle), you can see it's B flat.

Now, we've cycled back to the same identical chord voicing as we started with, only now it's B flat 11.

We can continue moving around the circle of 5ths by repeating the movements in this chord pattern and we'll arrive back to C11. So let's proceed on to B flat 7.to E flat 11to E flat 7to A flat 11to A flat 7to D flat 11to D flat 7to G flat 11to G flat 7to B11to B7to E 11to E7to A11to A7to D11to D7to G11to G7Back to our starting point at C11.