Hey, welcome to guitarlessons.com, I’m Nate Savage, and today, in this lesson we’re going to learn how to make Dominant 7th Chords. Now if you already know, you’re regular major triad shapes, all we’re going to do is stack one more note on top of that and it’s going to be a flatted 7th note. So for instance, if you have an A major scale [Demonstration], a G sharp is going to be your 7th and back up top an A, and in a Dominant 7th Chord, we don’t want a regular major 7th, we want to flat that note one half step and make it a G. So our G note is going to be the note we’re going to throw in with our A Major triad.
So, let’s make an A major triad really quick, start with your pinky on the 7th fret of your D string. Your third finger is going to grab the sixth fret of your G string, second finger is going to grab the fifth fret on your B string to give us an A major Triad, A, C sharp, E. And finally, we need a G to finish it off. A regular G sharp would be in a regular A major scale, just G sharp right here on the fourth fret of our high E string. But we want to have a flatted 7th for a Dominant Chord. So, just take that note and lower it one fret. You probably recognize that sound from like blues and stuff. It’s not a very practical shape again.
So, I’m going to teach you two voicing for Dominant 7th Chord that you can use in your play. Make a barre chord, cross the fifth fret with your index finger, then bar down, take your third finger on the seventh fret of your A string and your middle finger is going to grab the sixth fret of the G string and play all six notes [Demonstration].
So the second voicing that we’re going involves a bar on the same fret, the fifth fret, but we’re just going to bar the top five strings and maybe mute the sixth string with our index finger just by running it into, just a little bit, just enough to mute it. So take those five strings with four index finger, your third finger is going to grab the seventh fret on your D string, your pinky is going to grab the seventh fret on your B string. I’ll play the top five stings on your guitar [Demonstration]. So those are two common voicings for dominant seventh chord. So take those chords, and thumb into your blues playing maybe and use then as much as you can.
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