II - V - I - Part one of many

This is probably the most famous sequence of chords in contemporary western music. It can appear simple and ordinary but when we start using this sequence to prepare all the chords in the (or minor) scale chord progression (borrowed chords) things start to get interesting.

But today I want to share a experience I had this afternoon whilst practicing this sequence of chords II - V - I in the scale of C major - one drawback here is that as my second post about music I'm jumping from intervals to a more ??? I wouldn't say complex but a little bit advanced example. But soon I will write about chord progression etc. 

Back to the topic I was looking some chords that can be used in this sequence and I was amazed to notice how similar they are.

One of the sequences I was trying is composed by: IIm6 - V7(5#)- I7M.

What I want to point out is how similar the chords IIm6 and V7(5#) are . Let's have a look.

Dm6

G7(5#)

C7M

In this sequence Dm6 has the role as subdominant, G7(5#) is the dominant whilst C7M is the tonic.

Let's look others coincidences now. If we look the chord Bm7(5b):

Bm7(5b)

If we compare it with Dm6 we have exactly the same chord (unfortunately the m6 chord I chose for this example omits the 5th note A in which case would make both chords exactly the same). So we can exchange one by another - and bear in mind that this doesn't apply only for this example.

Now lets look the Dm6 chord I chose. If we compare it with a normal G7 we have almost the same chord!

G7

This is really what fascinates me about music, everything seems to be connected.

Other interesting observation can be done if we take the Dm6 chord used here and change F in the 3th string by G# we get D^o. As any diminished chord is symmetric every 1 tone and a half, walking to the next symmetric position ascendingly we have F^o. Hummm, so we can play F7M - F^o - Dm6 and finally C7M. In this case, if I'm not wrong, F^o and Dm6 are doing the same job as subdominant chords as II degree.

I think I'll stop for now, but before, one more sequence I had practiced today - using the chord shapes used here - not all:

Dm6 - G7(5#) - Bm6(5b) - C9