A beautiful 4- note chord – the major 7th chords

Good Morning. This is Duane. Today, I’d like to take up Major 7th chords. The last time took up Minor 7th chords, and there’s those very mellow chords. Those are Minor 7th chords, but Major 7th chords have a different feeling. Instead of sounding like that, it sound like this, and I really like that kind of … I love both of them, but I really like that, too. That’s an unbalanced chord, that is it’s a Major 3rd, followed by a Minor 3th, followed by a major 3rd. No. I mean, it’s a balanced chord. It’s a balanced chord, because you’ve got Major 3rd, a Minor 3rd, and a Major 3rd. It’s not unbalanced. That’s why it sounds like that.

Unbalanced chords are like diminished 7th chords where you have a stack of all minor 3rds or an augmented chord, which is all major 3rds, but this is a stack of major, minor, major.

Okay. So to form a major 7th chord is very easy. You simply take the major chord and add the major 7th. The major 7th being the 7th degree of the scale, wherever that is. In case of C, it’s B. If we go for half step to D flat. That’s a D flat major chord forward at the 7th B, where we got to know the D flat 7th scale, but it’s not one, isn’t it?

Here’s the D major chord, and if we know the D scale, we find that that’s the major 7th, so that’s D major 7th. Here’s E flat. There’s a major 7th. By the way, the major 7th’s always a half step down from the octave, so it’s really easy to find if you’re struggling with that.

Here’s the E major chord at a major 7th. Here’s the F major chord at a major 7th. Here’s a G flat major chord at a major 7th. Here’s the G major chord at a major 7th. Here’s the A flat major chord at a major 7th.

Now, let me show you. That’s major 7th chord of course, but you can also use a lot of techniques to make that chord sound interesting. For example, you could break it up like this, and then you could tuck your thumb under, tuck your thumb under, and you could come down like that, too. Little finger goes over, little finger rolls over. If you’re new to making runs, just take that really slow. Just do one octave over and over again. Until you can do that. Okay? Then when you can do that, then tuck your thumb under, and go up another octave and come back down. See that how that works? You just take it step-by-step.

Or you can use with the straddle. I like to use a straddle a lot. Remember, straddle is where you leave out one of the chord as you play two chord notes at a time and leave one out, and then you straddle down to the next one. If you hear the straddling, just do that at first. Just take one octave. Okay?

Let’s put it in a context to the song, say you’re playing this song. I think it’s called “Ebb Tide.” See now how it went, and on with the song. Okay? After you establish the melody, then you take that major 7th chord, the melody. Take that same Major 7th chord, and run it up.

Now, the Major 7th chord there becomes an A Minor 9th chord, because the root of the Chord is A at that point, but you can still use that same Major 7th on top of it, and it becomes A Minor 7th. See how that works? I think it’s … Now it goes like that. That’s a F Major 7th chord. You can run that up. I can remember how the song goes.

The next chord is G 7th. I’m putting it flat 9 fin. You see that? So you can build on that Major 7th chord in lots of different ways. Use a run like that or straddle like that of some sort. Those are straddle. Okay?

I’m very sloppy this morning. Forgive me for that. Anyway, you get the idea of Major 7th chords. That’s it for today. If you enjoy this sort of thing, come on over to Play Piano dot com, and sign up for a free newsletter. You get something like this most every day, and knowledge accumulates, of course. Knowledge builds on knowledge, so you learn little by little every day, and you can get somewhere someday. Thank for being with me. We’ll see you tomorrow. Bye, bye for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZSrla_Emlw&feature=youtu.be