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Let’s talk about minor 7 chords. Here is the A minor triad, A-C-D which is one, three and five. If we want to play A minor 7 it will be A-C-D-G which is one, three, five, seven. The simple thing to remember is that minor 7 of a chord is one tone below the root.
G is one tone below A. It doesn’t have to be played at the top of the chord like that it can be played at the bottom of the chord or the middle of the chord depending on which inversion of A minor you were playing originally just add the G in. That’s how you get play A minor 7.
The question is how do you know that G is the minor 7th of A? Well going back to definitions and going back to the basic interval knowledge, the major 7th of the chord is the 7th note of the major scale. By definition the minor 7th is one semi-tone smaller or lower than the major 7. Major means the bigger 7th, minor means the smaller 7th. The easy way to remember is that G is one tone below A. So that’s how you play Am 7.
A good thing to remember is that when you're playing Am7 or when you see Am7 on a page you can play the A on the left hand and drop the A out of right hand. So instead of playing an Am7 like this we can drop the A out of our right hand and we end up with what looks like a C major triad. So when you're playing Am7 think of it as C over A. You can play this in any inversion you want it depends on the context of the song and the melody. But C over A will result in Am7.
How will we remember C over A whenever you see Am7? Well count off three semi-tones from A, you got one, two, three and you play that major triad in the right hand. So let’s say I was playing Dm7 I would play D in the left hand and count off three semi-tones and play F chord in the right hand and that would be Dm7. And just to double check the 7 is one tone below the D, so that’s Dm7. Em7 would be E count off three semi-tones up and play a G triad in the right hand. So that’s the fastest and simplest way to remember your minor 7th. Play the root in the left hand and count three semi-tones up and play that major triad in the right hand.
For those of you with classical background you may have noticed that C chord over A is really the relative major over the minor root, but then it may make no sense to you don’t worry just count three semi-tones up and play C over A.
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