So the song “Just the Two of Us” has a lot of opportunity for things like passing chords. And first of all, we’re going to look at this in A minor. And to get there, we’re going to use the V chord of A minor, which is E.
We make an adaptation to the scale of A minor to include the third of the C chord, a G sharp. And to get there, we’re going to descend onto that V chord from a half step above, the VI. And in fact, that’s where we start the progression.
That’s the basis for the song. Now, obviously, there’s some goodness in between. And so to get from this A back to this F, we’re going to use the V of the F.
Bringing it back, we have F, E7, A minor, C7, F, E minor, A minor. Let’s add one more because we could get to this C using a 2-5-1 progression to the F, G minor, C7, F. From the beginning, F.
So far so good. Let’s put this into a friendlier voicing. How about like this?
Now, I know you want to get to the creamy stuff, but let’s add some passing chords before we get to the sauce. That would look like this. Now, if our target is here, we’re going to take advantage of the fact that it’s only a couple of half steps away and we can slide down to it using a passing chord.
It’s exactly the same chord. And now, we can look at how to get some of the sauce in there. We’re going to do that with some chord extensions.
So let’s build this A from here. It looks the same. It just has a ninth in it.
Our F. And all the other chords. We can look at some additional inversions as well.
So instead of voicing this here, let’s move this down to here and let’s move this down to there. Same chord. So now, we’ve got these saucy little minor seconds in there and they sound great.
And look how easy it’s going to be to change this G minor 7 to a C with the flick of one finger. And so now, we get into chord extensions and voice leading and all the other creamy stuff that’s not going to fit into this video, but I will show you one other cool little trick here, which would be maybe this. Let’s use a flat 9 for that C chord.
This is our G, and when we change this to a C, we want this to move to the third of our C and this to become our flat 9. That gives you a 13 on top. Hope that helps.
