How to Play 7th Chords on Guitar

seven chords in my opinion one of the most incorrectly used chords out there it seems to me that uh a lot of times I hear them as transitional Segways and really bad sitcoms or in the music that they play while they describe the sound effects in pharmaceutical drug [Music] commercials but there's so much more than that and I want to talk about what goes behind a seven chord and how to make them in different ways now when you see a seven chord like a G7 or an A7 it's actually shorthand for G dominant 7 which is different than G major 7 or G minor 7 anything like that so I want to talk about why it's so dominant what's so dominant about a dominant seven chord so if you have a g let's take the easiest one to play is G this is the first frat on the high E string you can play the bottom four strings like that or you can kind of make a traditional G and then switch it here now what's happening is we're just altering one note in a G chord uh when you're first playing you might think this is in the key of G but the thing about a seven chord or a dominant seven chord is if you're playing a G7 musically you cannot be in the key of G and the reason this is is because of m music theory so if you have a G7 chord you're actually in the key of C musically speaking that doesn't mean that's the only place you can use it but uh I'll explain why that is so a G major chord is a g a b and a d so if you're in the key of G youd have a g a b c d e f g those are your notes and what a seven chord any kind of seven chord is doing is is taking the first third fifth and seventh notes of that key in combining so if you're in the key of G you took the first note is a g the second note is a b the second of the chord so the one three the fifth note is a d and the seventh note would be an F sharp now if you combined all those notes together you would get a a G major 7 but what a dominant seven is is you flatten the seventh note so instead of having an F sharp in there I have an F so G major 7 which would be in the key of G or G dominant 7 G7 has a very signature sound major 7 dominant 7 major major 7 at seven so in different Keys the notes will line up to give you that F in a different key so let's go to the key of C real quick which the notes are c d e f g a b c now if we were to take C's chord we'd have a c and e and a g and then if we add the seventh note we'll have a b which would give give us a C major 7 or a couple different voicings now if we did the same thing with G we start on G's note which in the key of C G is the fifth note okay so if we start at five in the key of C we'll start with G's note G's going to have a g if you skip a note you'll have a b and Skip another one it's a d it's a GB D that makes a G major so G major is actually the fifth chord in the key of C now if we were to add the next note in the key of C to G the seventh note from G with these same numbers you would have an F now remember when we did it in the key of G we had an F but now we have an F so if we play those notes together that's how you achieve a dominant seven chord so in any key the fifth note in that key is going to be where the dominant seven chord resides so it's a good thing to kind of at least be able to count off off musically in any key in where that note is and then you can actually use it in more creative ways if you want to use it as a five use it as a five traditionally use it as a one you can kind of like actually break these rules once you know them and it makes more sense when you break them so for example I'm going to play the the notes in the key of C starting on a g so g a b c d e f not F sharp and back to G now scale-wise this is actually a different mode it's called The Mixing mode so for to play those notes in order an arpeggio of it it be g b d and f okay and knowing this we can start making different shapes and that's why we're going to talk about some different voicings of a dominant 7 so it's not always the same now the most traditional one I usually see bar chord wise is like this so this is taking a major bar chord and then removing your pinky and what that's doing is it's freeing up this note and playing this note which as we just saw was 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 the dominant seven otherwise known as the flat 7even sometimes you'll hear oh like G with a flat 7 is a G7 which is true but a different voicing you can do that's kind of cool that you see in like cool jazz songs and wherever is this one right here now I'm playing the G I'm actually skipping the a string I'm not going to hear it okay I'm going right to that seven so there's a g and the dominant seven or G and the flat 7even and then I'm adding a b which is really the third of G but an octave up and I'm just playing three notes that so what I have is I have a g an f and a b so what's happening is the five in this chord you'll notice there's no D in this chord and most G's are G's are supposed to have a D in it to make it major chord or a minor chord or whatever but we're implying the D in this instance so it still sounds most of the way there so it still counts as a G7 and now these are movable shapes so this is a G sharp 7 A7 a dominant 7 a lot of people play A7 like this so these are all different voicings of what we can do here now again the easiest one to do is a G7 like this you just hold this down now if you think of this as a movable shape say we want to play G sharp 7 let's move it up a fret and just bar the other ones here so you can think of this as being the seven that you need to add to a chord so what I mean by that is like okay here's a regular G major if you think of your root note CU this is a G and G major if you think of your root note as being right here and backing it off two Frets that'll always give you the flat seven of any key so if you're looking for a seven chord you can track the root note that you're looking for like let's say I'm looking for a C7 I know that the eighth fret here is a c i can back it up that'll give me C's flat 7 and then I can just bar it like I would be here but the fet's doing it [Music] so it's a pretty easy chord voicing you just kind of have to hold down a few Chords it's kind of like a mini bar chord I guess that you can use anywhere so we've got a couple different voicings we've got this new one here we got this one which we can active up and then we'll do uh we'll do another one which is going to be if you're rooting on the a string so it's actually go all the way down 10th fret on the a string is another G right if we have a regular major bar chord there's G major we got to turn this note into this note there's that seven again all right so we can do that and actually you can do this bar chord like this which if you're playing acus guitar especially that can kind of put some pressure on your hand so maybe you want to make this easier let's just do it like [Music] this and again we can imply using a three note chord we're implying that fourth note and making that uh a seven chord and again these are all movable shapes now because there's no open strings so here's a seven and now we can move this all over the place so knowing music theory and knowing how to come about a seven will help you make any chord in any spot on the guitar that you want and uh the last thing so what's so dominant about a dominant seven chord it's kind of a weird name something I thought of for a while too now the reason it's called a dominant 7 is because it occurs like like we talked about earlier on the fifth note in a scale so again if I'm in c 1 2 3 4 5 there's G right aside from the one note there's a pull there's a musical pull to the fifth note in any key that's why in a lot of songs if there's if it's in the Key C there's probably a G chord in there too because that five chord that fifth note pulls you musically a lot so it's a very dominant sound inside of the key I guess that's the way that I like to think about it so the reason it's called a dominant 7 is because it occurs on the five in music theory you don't always have to use it on the five if you know what I mean by saying that but that's where musically it fits the best now again knowing all this now you can make more creative decisions like I know a lot of Blues players treat a dominant 7 on the three chord so again what that means is if I was in the key of C my third note is an e so the chord would be E minor the seven chord would be E minor 7 now some players treat that as if that were a dominant thing so I'm going outside of the key but I'm going to play that e as an E7 e dominant 7 okay so I'm going to add that to my other chords so I can have two7 chords and the same thing I'll start with the regular C [Music] Major G to maybe a minor to a E7 and that sounds fine it sounds kind of like interesting but that's just one way of creatively using music theory to make up your own your own interesting chord progressions just like that so that was just like a one five 6 three chord progression but that three isn't a traditional three it's not an E minor it's an E7 so uh knowing all these rules can give you an identity as a player and that'll make your core progressions sound differently and once you know these things then you can kind of like isolate how to make a song Sound more like your style of playing so it's really important dominant seven chords there you go

Channel: Sean Daniel

Views: 136,695

Keywords: how to make a 7 chord, music theory, guitar lesson, music theory guitar, seventh chord, seven chords, 7 chord guitar, easy music theory, easy guitar chord, music theory help, free guitar lesson, best guitar, guitar video 7 chords

Id: DcQWeEe9aMs

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2015