The ii–V–I in C is Dm7, G7, Cmaj7 — the most-played three chords in jazz, in the key with nothing to trip over. The line below is built bar by bar from the walking recipe: root on one, third on two, fifth on three, and an approach note on four that leans into the next bar’s root.
Reading the line
Bar one spells Dm7 from the root up — D, F, A — then drops to a low F to step up into G: an approach from a whole step below, and your first taste of the recipe’s pull. Bar two is the classic dominant bar: G, B, D, and then B again, the leading tone, which lands a half step under C and makes the resolution feel like gravity rather than choice. Bar three arrives home and keeps walking — C, E, G, B — because a walking line never sits down; and the final bar closes the circle up the octave, C to E to G to high C at the fifth fret of the G string.
Practicing it
Loop it at sixty BPM with every note held to the very edge of the next — walking lines die when the quarters get clipped. Once it runs clean, test the recipe: swap bar two’s last note for an Ab (chromatic from above) and hear how the resolution changes color but not conviction. Then take the same three chords to the key of C page and walk them in a different order — the C major scale map shows you every approach note the key contains. When C feels inevitable, the walk in F moves the whole construction down the neck.