Seventh Chords
Seventh Chords are very popular in the construction
of pop song melody. Major sevenths can create very nice melodies
and dominant sevenths can add a bluesy feel to any tune.
Accenting the 7th and 5th of the chord in
a seventh chord melodic word is going to give us the most
musical melodic words that seventh chords can generate. Click
here to listen. The interval of the major seventh is one that
is less used in pop songs in general. You can try it and see
if it works for you. Click here to listen. However, minor
seconds of the seventh going to the root note sound very good.
Click here to listen.
To get the most out of melodic words based
on seventh chords, scale segments and within variations are
going work very well. Also, similarly to 4 note chords, since
there are 3 thirds, this can be re-arranged with the variation
technique outlined above (see "How to make your own variations).
Below are the variations that work best for the 7th chord.
There is another aspect of major seventh chords
which is more advanced, but I'll mention it anyway for those
of you more experienced in music. Just like we can think of
6th chords as minor seventh chords , you can think of a major
seventh chord as a minor chord over a root a major third below.
This works for the C and F chord. So, the C major seventh
chord will be an E minor over C and for F major seventh it's
an A minor over F.
What that means is that you can play an E
minor chord, or any variation of an E minor chord and it will
sound good over a C major seventh, or A minor for F major
seventh. Any of our techniques of inversion, scale segments
and color notes, and the melodic words that they yield, applied
to the minor chord will work well over a major seventh chord.
Below are some brief examples outlining this. If you don't
understand this now, it'll become clear in the section of
combining major and minor chords.
The dominant seventh chord, built on the G,
and written as G7 is a different sounding chord than the major
seventh chord. (Click here to listen). Dominant seventh chords
are very supple and versatile chords. They work great for
blues and you could write many a blues tune just using C7,
F7 and G7, treating all as dominant seventh chords. (Click
here to listen).
Dominant seventh chords are the most flexible
chords in the whole chord vocabulary. You can modify them
in many different ways. Melodically, if you focus on the 7th,
5th and 3rd, you work with the notes that most define the
dominant seventh chord. Using scale segments between these
notes also creates interesting melodies.
Also, like major seventh chords, you can think
of a dominant seventh chord as a diminished chord over a major
third. The diminished chord is a very versatile and strange
chord, and it will be fully explained in the section about
in combining major and minor chords. But melodically, it's
the B-D-F of the chord, and those are the 3rd, 5th and 7th.
Below are variations of a dominant seventh
chord. Like the major seventh chord, I'm only showing the
variations work best.
