Where to Begin - Diatonic 7th chords

Hi, it's Chris with Implied Music. Where to begin? We're breaking it down into manageable bite-sized chunks, so a different component of music theory in each of these videos. The last one I did was on dominant chords. Dominant chords are a kind of a seventh chord, but there are other kinds of seventh chords. In fact, there's a seventh chord on every step of the major scale and the minor scale, and I want to look at those different kinds of seventh chords today. They're powerful tools for us. It can be a little bit confusing, and the question is, just what's a seventh chord? How does it show up in scales, chord progressions, music? How can I use it? Well, a seventh chord is a dissonant chord. It can, if when you play all of the notes, and here's a C major seven chord, have a kind of an elegant quality. However, it does have in it a dissonant interval, and that dissonance is really important to the sound of the seventh chord. Every seventh chord has in it the interval of a seventh, and we'll talk about what that is in a second. Before I do that, just a little housekeeping. Now's a great time to subscribe to the channel. If you've seen a couple of my videos and they're useful to you, subscribe. It helps the channel. It helps the community that we're building here, and I hope it'll help you to see more of these videos. Also, I'm contemplating my next step, a Patreon page and an opportunity for me to create content that, you know, might not fit on YouTube or might just take more work and more time for me to prepare. So what kind of things would be useful for you? What kind of content do you feel you need in your music or do you think might be entertaining at some level, musically entertaining? So listen, let's jump into seventh chords, and if you haven't looked at my video about scales and triads, the diatonic chords of the major scale, maybe that's a good first step. Let's assume you've looked at it, but maybe a quick review before we take it that one step further into seventh chords. So just as a foundation, I'm basing what I'm talking about on the idea of the octave. The octave is a fundamental unit in music, and we divide the octave into 12 equal steps. Not every composer and musician does, but it's a really important way to start. And then the scale uses some of those notes in a pattern, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. That pattern is the major scale, and I can start anywhere and get a major scale using that pattern. It's really, really important. Now, we build triads and chords from scales most of the time. It's not the only way to do it, but in a lot of pop music and in classical music from the European tradition, 18th century traditions, that's kind of where we begin. And so that fundamental unit of the triad, as you can see, is composed of a third at the bottom and a third at the top. And I guess if you think about it, it makes perfect sense to add another third on the top of that. Every seventh chord is made of four notes like that, and those four notes each have a role. The bottom note is the root. Up a third is the third of the chord. It may be major or minor. This one's major. Up a third from there is the fifth. The fifth can be perfect, like the one that we're seeing here. On very rare occasions, it might be diminished. We'll talk about that in a moment. On top of that, we're going to add another interval, the interval of the seventh. And that seventh is, in this case, a fairly strongly dissonant interval. Every seventh chord is like that, and there's a seventh chord on every step of the scale, of any scale. Let's take a look at them. The one chord in the major scale is a major seven chord, and it's identified by two important characteristics. It's got a major third, the E in this case, and a major seventh. Look how the major seventh, B, is just a half step below the root of the chord, below the C. There's a C down here and a C up here, and there's the major seventh. That's why it sounds so spicy. The one chord is a major seven. As I go up to the two chord, I get a different quality of seventh chord. Now, the third is minor. There's only three half steps between the root and the third. There's the perfect fifth, and there's a seventh, and this is a minor seventh. Remember how the major seventh was a half step below the root? This seventh is a whole step below the root, and I'll tell you, it's a less dissonant, although still dissonant, interval. Mildly dissonant? I don't know. As a result, the minor seven chord has a kind of a sweetness to it, and I kind of like the sound. On the third step of the scale, the E minor seven is another minor seven chord. On the fourth step of the scale, I'm only using notes from the C scale here now, F major seven. It's got a major third and a major seven. Have you been keeping track? Let's take an inventory. Major seven, minor seven, minor seven, major seven. We've had two major sevens, two minor sevens, and now we come to the fifth step of the scale, and this is where the dominant chord lives, and it's a special seventh chord. It's got a major third and a minor seventh. It's the only seventh chord in the scale that has that, and as such, it makes it easy to identify, and it's very important in the scale. It really does a big job. Look at the dominant video to hear more about it. Strong sound, isn't it? Wants to resolve. And just to say one more thing about that dominant chord, this fifth step of the scale, this chord here has a tritone in it, and that tritone is the most important interval in the major scale. It really wants to go someplace. It wants to do that. It really wants to resolve, and that resolution, that tension in resolution, is the narrative story of functional harmony. It's really crucial. Well, there's that dominant chord on five going on to the sixth step of the scale. The sixth step of the scale, there's another minor seventh chord. My goodness, the seventh step of the scale. Well, this is an unusual seventh chord. It's B minor seven with a flat five. Let's take a look at this. Well, there's a minor third. There's a minor seventh, but this note here isn't a regular fifth. It's not a perfect fifth. Seven half steps? No. It's, because we're in the key, it's a tritone, and that tritone is the same tritone that we saw in the G7 chord. G7 has this tritone. B minor seven has this tritone. Great sounding chords, all of them. How can I use them? You can use your seventh chords in the same way that you use triads, and I'll show you what I mean. Let's take, for instance, a simple progression. One, five, six, four. We know from the inventory that we just took that the one chord is a major seven chord, so C major seven. We know that the five chord is a dominant chord. We know that the six chord is a minor seven chord, and the four chord is major seven. I just made all those chords seventh chords. It's a more elegant sound, isn't it? The added tone, the seventh on the top of the triad, gives us access to a more sophisticated tonal palette without really changing the function of the chord at all. Seventh chords are everywhere in music, and you can have the seventh chords appearing that don't function quite like this. They might just be just beautiful examples of a sonority. In disco, very often we had floating minor seventh chords. Just kind of pretty, and you hear it in neosoul contemporary music quite a bit. In blues, you can have every chord be a dominant chord, and you see seventh chords appearing just as spicy colors in tons of music that, you know, don't sort of work in circles like that example that we just gave there. But the seventh always adds a texture, an added color, an expanded set of possibilities, perhaps. In the future, we'll talk about how the thirds and the sevenths in seventh chords really do a lot of work for us. It's kind of beyond the scope of this discussion, but in the meantime, sit down at your piano or on your guitar and explore the seventh chords of the scales that you're interested in. The major scale has four types of seventh chords. The major seven chord, the minor seven chord, the dominant seven chord, and the minor seven flat five chord. Can you think of one other possibility? There is one. What if you had a minor third and a major seven, right? What if, you know, there's a bunch of possibilities. What if you had a major third, diminished fifth, major seven? That's a spicy sound. Lots of possible seventh chords out there. Not all of them will feel normal to you, but try them out. Hey, I hope this has been useful. Like and subscribe. Now's the time to do it. I asked at the top of the video, and if you didn't do it then and you made it all the way to the end, there's a good reason to do it now. And listen, I'll see you next time.