Rob Schumann: The subject of this tutorial is seventh chords and this is something that's important to get into after you have learned all of your basic Major and Minor chords and then the Sus chords as well. Seventh chords are something that's used in a lot of different songs; there are several varieties that we look at. It's not really an alteration of your Major and Minor chords, it's really an addition; it's called an extension to your chords. So we will look at how to do the fingerings of those and we will talk about the different sounds where you would actually use them.
So let's us start with just a regular Major chord, such as an A Major. We have talked about different fingerings you can use to play that, one, two, three, two all the way across, two, three, four or a combination of those fingers, whatever works best for you. When we form a seventh chord what we are trying to do is, find the root note that's in the chord, that's not on the bottom of it. So what I mean by that is, when we play an A Major chord, we have got a root here on the fifth string that brings us an A, but we also have another A here on the second fret of the third string. That's the note that we are going to change, since we have already got another one of it on the bottom. We are going to change that into the seventh.
So let's start with a Major seven. To do that, I am going to take this root note of the Major chord and I am going to move it back one fret or one step. So I am going from A to a G#. So for this fingering, it's probably best to have your second fret of the fourth string, first finger on the first fret of the third string and third finger on the second fret of the second string. That gives me a Major7 chord.
Now I should talk about the functions of all these as well. A lot of the times guitar teachers will give these to their students and students will go home and practice and then it will be chord sound that they are not familiar with and they won't even know what it is for.
This Major7 gives a regular Major chord a much jazzier kind of sound, a soft sound, but it gives you sort of a melodic jazz kind of sound. So it gets sort of that lounge vibe out of it, but that's a Major7 sound and that's used in quite a few songs. The other alteration that's made to a Major chord is a Dominant 7 chord and what's going to happen is instead of going back one fret I am going to go back two frets, so in this case back one and then back one more to the open string.
So rather than the Major, I am just going to take off that middle note and there are some different ways you can play this chord, you can do it this way, with just picking up the second finger. Probably, the most common way to play this chord is to have the second finger on the second fret of the fourth string and third finger on the second fret of the second string. That gives me a dominant 7 or it's just called a seventh chord. That's just written A with a seven next to it, so it's a dominant 7. That one if you don't know what this four can be, an unusual sounding chord.
We have got two main functions that we see quite a bit. One function is to pull to another chord. It sets up the last chord in a progression. A seventh chord pulls to a major chord that is five steps below it or a fifth below it. That's what we would call it. So this A7 would be wanting to pull to D, because if you go down the alphabet, we have A, G, F, E, D, that's a fifth below. So if I strum on this, you can hear, it really wants to pull the D. So that's one function and that the other function is to just sort of ride on that seventh chord and that gives you a blues or classic rock kind of sound.
If I am trying to play regular 12 bar blues sounds with just a Major chord, you can hear that doesn't really have that blues vibe to it. If I turn that into a dominant seven, you can hear it has that little extra ingredient. Then you start adding some extra notes to that or the bass player starts doing something interesting and you have got yourself a blues song in a band. So that gives us the A7 and the A Major7.
So we have that A Major7 and A7. We will move onto some of our other basic chords that we have looked at. We had a C Major chord and we can do the same things to this. In this case, C is our root note down here at the bottom and our other root note is stand up here on the first fret of the second string. So I want to take that down one step, I can just remove my finger and that will give me the Major7. So there is my C Major7 chord, you can hear some of that jazz sound in it.
For a C dominant 7, in this case, I am already on an open string with that first finger, so it's impossible to go down any lower. So I can actually just keep that there and I can find that note here on the third string by just adding my fourth finger to the third fret. So I have got C, then adding this here gives me a C dominant 7. So you hear that, sort of a blues sound or the C Chord would want to resolve to an F. So there is our dominant chord.
Now we will move on to a D Major chord. So here is our fourth string D Major that we have looked at before. In this case, the grid is here on the fourth string, but I have got another one on the third fret of the second string. So to do a Major, I can take that fret and back it up a one to give me the Major7 and to finger that we could do all three fingers, but most commonly you will just see one finger barred across those three strings of the second fret.
So there is that jazz sounding Major7. For the dominant 7 I need to take this guy back two frets to the first fret and so I will still need to fret the other two strings at the second fret. So for this one I have got the first finger on the first fret of the second string, second finger on the second fret of the third string and third finger on the second fret of the first string. So that gives me a D7. This one really wants to resolve back to G.
So there is D7 and D Major7, moving onto E Major. Here I want to mention something that's important, I have actually got several roots here. I have got the root on the bottom, sixth string; I have also got a root here on the fourth string, and a root on the first string. Now this root here on the four string is on the second fret, so I could back that up and then I will also have it on the open fourth string for my seventh chords.
However, it can make your chord sound really muddy if all those alterations are on the basement and it just doesn't really make a guitar sound good to be on those lower strings, when you have the sevenths next to some other intervals. So we have got some other possibilities here. For the Major7, probably the easiest way to do that is to take your second finger, lean it back just a little bit and actually mute this fourth string so that way you don't have to have all kinds of fingers pressed down. So mute that fourth string and then have the fourth finger on the fourth fret of the second string.
For this chord, you would actually just strum the bottom five strings. If you want to be really daring, you could try pressing down two strings with one finger here on the second fret or you could really stretch that third finger over and try to grab it, but that's probably the best way to do it. It's just fretting it like that. So I am hitting the second fret, fifth string, muting the fourth string, hitting the first fret third string, and then grabbing that seventh note here on the fourth fret of the second string.
So there are several different ways to play that chord. That's probably the easiest, especially if you are just starting to play guitar. So that fourth finger is good to be over here fourth fret of the second string. First finger is on the first fret of the third string and the second finger is on the second fret of the fifth string and we are muting the fourth string in this case. You will see alteration to that chord. The E dominant 7 in this position is a little bit easier; for that you can just keep the same E Major shape. Rather than having to do some stretch, all we are having to do is just add the fourth finger to the third fret of the second string.
So that gives us a real nice E domina
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