Have a wide variety of seventh chords on your guitar will allow you to express emotions through music while creating progressions with greater ease. There are five kinds of seventh chords: major, minor, dominant major seventh, seventh major minor fifth and dim7 chords.
Each chord has its own sound. Converting triads into seventh chord counterparts requires nothing more than moving one note in the stack!
Major Seventh
Major seventh chords (maj7) are an extremely popular 7th chord used in jazz music. This type of chord consists of a major triad with an additional major seventh interval added on top.
To form a major seventh chord, simply add one major interval above your root note – for instance if it’s G, add F# above it – sometimes known as an Emaj7 shape or Amaj7 shape.
Any basic drop 2 maj7 shape can be expanded by adding in additional ninth (9), eleventh (11) or thirteenths (13). This variation of a basic drop 2 maj7 chord is known as maj9 chord, maj7add13 chord or maj7add11 chord; they provide great variations to add variety when playing maj7 progressions! Have fun exploring how you might use these in your music!
Minor Seventh
Minor seventh chords produce an emotive, melancholic sound, making them ideal for use with ballads and ballad-based songs. Furthermore, their deep tone works wonderfully when played alongside jazzy piano or horns.
These chords combine a minor triad and minor seventh interval for more relaxed but still dissonant chords.
An E minor seventh chord typically comprises the notes E, G, and B; however, by lowering both third and seventh frets one fret further this formation becomes an open Em7 chord with notes E-G-B-D.
Learn the following chord shapes to add depth and variety to your guitar playing. Practice them in various keys and use them in songs for greater chord diversity. It also makes an excellent fingerstyle candidate.
Dominant Seventh
Dominant seventh chords are an integral component of many genres of music and often used as the starting point for modulations techniques. Their extra dissonance creates an impetus towards the tonic of their current key, creating a powerful “push”.
Dominant seventh chords differ from major triads in that they feature an additional minor seventh note to create more dissonant tones that help create tension and resolution in musical compositions.
Dominant seventh chords have long been used as an effective musical element, such as Carl Perkins’ early hit “Blue Suede Shoes”. Elvis Presley himself made extensive use of dominant seventh chords when writing hits like ‘Heartbreak Hotel” and “That’s All Right”, both built around these toe-tapping chords.
Half-Diminished Seventh
Seventh chords are four note chords created by adding an interval of seven above any regular major or minor triad, creating an dissonant dissonant chord drenched with tension that adds emotion and drama to your music.
E half-diminished 7th chords provide a great starting point to understanding these types of chords. Being symmetrical chords, any root can be used.
Understanding this chord lies within its alternate name – minor7 flat 5. This indicates that this is a minor 7th chord with its perfect 5th interval flattened by one semitone to create diminished notes – perfect intervals that have been decreased by one semitone are termed minor, vice versa.
Mix & Match
As a jazz musician, you may encounter seventh chords that don’t comply with standard triad and seventh rules. This necessitates taking an alternative approach. Instead of using C7(#11) for dominant seventh chords, call them Db7(b9#11#5) instead.
Sevenths add depth and emotion to triads, which is why they can often be found in jazz, R&B and blues genres. While sevenths may still make an appearance occasionally in other styles that utilize diminished and full triads more frequently (e.g. rock music or metal), sevenths may not feature as prominently.
After becoming comfortable with basic major and minor chords, seventh chords provide a great next step to further enhance song arrangements by adding tension or warmth depending on their position in the song.
Finger workouts like these are also great exercises for strengthening ring and pinky fingers! With practice, this exercise will allow you to master formations incorporating major 7, minor 7, and dominant 7 notes.
Major
Once you have mastered major and minor triads, seventh chords provide another great way to add color and variety to chord progressions while at the same time practicing matching chords to melodies (an essential skill for any guitarist).
To play a major seventh chord, start with the root note of the chord, stack a major third above it followed by two minor thirds above that, and join them all together into the chord.
Before beginning with your first major seventh chord, it’s advisable to play each string and note individually and observe how your chord sounds – this will allow you to hear how muffled or off any are; additionally try playing scales over it to make sure they match well; this step is key when learning any type of chord type.
Minor
Minor chords resemble major ones but contain a flattened third. Although this process can be complex, as an overview: in order to obtain a minor scale we take C as its base and flatten its third note so it becomes E or Eb. This change distinguishes them from each other and gives these chords their distinct tone of melancholia and melancholic sounding tones.
Songwriters don’t rely solely on one major scale when creating songs; they may use multiple chord shapes as well. Understanding how a minor scale can create these chords is a vital piece of guitar theory, which Fender Play offers free online lessons to teach. Get started instantly with its 30-day free trial to develop muscle memory for chords on the fretboard.
Dominant
The dominant seventh chord is a key element of 12 bar blues. Comprised of roots, major third and minor seventh of a C dominant scale scale, its dark sound allows songwriters to evoke tension and unresolved emotion in their songs. Due to dissonant dissonance caused by its minor seventh interval being one semitone lower than what would typically occur within tonic chords, tension and unrest is created within this chord, creating dissonant sounds within it that result in its unnerved sound and ultimately creating dissonance within it resulting in its unrestful sound.
Though any chord can feature a minor seventh interval and be called a dominant 7, creating one properly requires specific techniques that we’ll discuss below. Here are four dominant 7 drop 2 voicings with their associated guitar neck diagrams for reference; black represents root position; blue shows 1st inversion; red displays 2nd inversion and green displays 3rd inversion voicings have different sounds and signature voicings that can help create melodies of different types.
Harmonic
Building chords from the Harmonic Series adds fullness to your chord that regular triads don’t. This technique is often employed by power and metal guitarists who often employ distortion to thicken up their chords further.
To produce harmonics on guitar, fret a note using your fretting finger before touching it 12 frets higher with your picking hand’s first finger (index finger for left-handers). Be sure to place your finger directly over the fretwire so as to achieve clean harmonics; otherwise they will sound muffled or muted instead.
Strum your strings while simultaneously lifting your finger off of the fret to produce a beautiful chime, an excellent way to add harmonics to dominant 7th chords while sounding flat/7ths without adding additional tones that could conflict with root notes in dominant seventh chords.