As usual for the start of the chapter, I am going to present some fresh chord vocabulary to you. And the two chords I have in store are both dominant sevens. I will tell you exactly what they are in due course. But on the general note, they are dominant sevens. When somebody dominates something or someone – I am sure you know what dominate is – you dominate something, you take control over it. It is very overbearing so let us strike right to the point. Let us take the key C for example, you already know by now that it has a name on it. But this is what happens when I play a G7 and that is one of the chords I will be showing you very shortly. Just bear with me as I play it.
I know I made the volume go a little bit louder there. But did you get the sense? That when I went to the G7, it kind of took charge did it not? It dominated the proceedings. As far as I am concerned, in my interpretation of what dominant is, that is how it dominates the key of C. That G7 kind of took charge and dominated the key. So now, you know why it is called dominant. The dominant chords are usually, theoretically, the 5th chord of a key. Did it come to your attention that C, one, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one, one, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one. The dominant chord is the 5th of the key. That is a perfect cadence. It composes toward that cadences like literally, when we talk about commas and semi colons and full stops. A perfect cadence five to one, five, one, five, one whether you go down from five to one or up from five to one. Whichever way you go, it is a perfect cadence.
So I have told you what dominant is. But what about seven? Why is it seventh chord? Well, unsurprisingly, there is a seven in there. It is very, very easy to understand. Let me spell it out to you literally. Tertiary harmony as I believe I have mentioned earlier means quite simply taking every other note. One, two, three, four, five that is as far as we got in terms of triads, one, two, three, four, five, guess what six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you need four ingredients in theory to produce the seventh chord. To be specific – and I am not going to get into too many details here but to be specific, you need to know that the seventh that we want is a flattened seventh. The flattened seventh is ten semi times or minus seventh the way from the root. That is technical though. I think it is much easier for most of us including me to think a tone behind the root or two frets behind the root. This is very simple, let me go to G. We want G7. Here is G. I am drawing this note your attention, top string, first string, 3rd fret. We want to go back two frets, I will finger that with my index finger, and there you have it. This is the flattened seventh to be precise. It is the active ingredient. It is the thing that makes G7. Jump down G major. Can you see it? Once again, I am taking something that you know and show you how to modify it to become something apparently new.
Before we leave that, remember earlier though you are playing C to G. Well, even stronger and even more dominant is playing G dominant seven to C. If you play G to C, that is okay. Listen to G7, to C. I got hidden agenda here which I am revealing to you now. I am teaching you about a perfect cadence and that is five, one, five, one, five, one, five, one. By playing dominant seventh, it emphasizes this feeling of wanting to resolve – that desperately wants to resolve to that. I will be playing certain sounds of classical music. It is considered inappropriate or that went wrong. But leave that ringing. You are supposed to resolve that. The blues is another story. We will come to that later.
So you have learned a five, one progression and the five code is now seventh. That is not a contradiction. It is hard to put in verbal terms. Let me just take it low as if I am writing roman numeral five with a superscript small Arabic seven, roman numeral V for five superscript seven. That is how you will see the fifth code of the key. The dominant chord of the key as a sevent
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