Practical Theory: Improvising over a Minor Key Progression

In my last lesson, we covered the topic of improvising over a minor 7 chord.

This time around, we’re going to focus on improvising over a minor key progression.

For this lesson, we’ll use this progression:

| Am7 | G7 | FMaj7 | FMaj7 Bm7b5 |

For this particular progression, you can play the A minor Aeolian/A minor pentatonic scale, or as we discussed last time, you can view it as C Major ionian / C Major pentatonic instead.

Part 1 – Demo/Intro:

In this first part, I’ll demo my approach to this progression, and then start to break it down:

Part 2 – Breaking it down with scales:

Here, I describe the scales we can use (A minor Aeolian, A minor pentatonic, C Major pentatonic):

Part 3 – Breaking it down with chords:

We’ll now focus on thinking about this from a chord perspective, and how our note choice throughout the progression makes a difference: