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Originally Posted by DesertTwang
Thank you all so much for your responses! Really helpful.
JonPR, you actually answered another question that had me confused, and your explanation saved me from opening another thread about that:
I'm also taking online lessons with Bryan Sutton's Flatpicking School on artistworks, and in one recent exercise, Bryan has us crosspick through arpeggiated chords based on the G scale. It's very similar to what I was asking about in this thread, except that in his video lesson, Bryan calls the seventh chord "D7." This really confused me, because he goes through all the chords as I expected — G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em — but then suddenly, the last chord is yet another D chord before landing back on the G chord.
I chalked it up to him simply misspeaking and in fact referring to the F#m chord, but now I understand why he calls that a D7; apparently they're the same(?).
I think I get it now: The F#m chord consists of the notes F#-A-C, and the D7 chord of D-F#-A-C. I just never realized that because I didn't sit down and really compared the two until now.
Thanks again. I love this sub forum.  |
You might want to look into a teacher instead of random YouTube vids, they're crossing your signals.
Let me see if I can help. Let’s go back to that G major scale.
G A B C D E F#
Okay, so to make chords, we stack the interval of a “third.” Thirds are notes that are either 3 half steps or 4 half steps apart. There’s two different types of thirds, major and minor--Let’s just leave it at that for a minute, because all the notes we need to know are built right into that scale.
By taking every other note, we are finding those intervals of thirds. So…
G B D
A C E
B D F#
C E G
D F# A
E G B
F# A C
If we put names to these, we get the following chords
G major, A minor, B minor, C major, D major, E minor, and an F# diminished triad. That last guy doesn’t get used too often in most music.
I think you’ve got this part straight.
The 7th chord thing seems to be messing you up. That’s because of the crossover in language…there’s seven chords that can be found as belong to each scale, and one of them is the “seventh” chord (that’s our F# here)
But chords can also be harmonized further to include another note, and those 4 note chords are called “seventh chords.” To add insult to injury, there's not one type of seventh chord--but let's hold off on that for a minute. The one we are concerned with is the fifth chord of the scale, the "DOMINANT SEVENTH CHORD." Yeah, it's that important.
In the key of G—it’s the 5th chord, the Dmajor, is the DOMINANT--and that's the one that most often has the 7th added to it.
Take the “every other note thing” one step further: We get D F# A C.
This is a D7 chord. I think that gets a little confusing to people too, because the type of 7th interval in a “7th” chord is actually a “flat seventh.” Just accept that as it is for now, we can go further and things will make sense, but let me make sure this is as clear as can be first.
Making the 5th chord in a key a “7th” chord sounds great because the sound of it naturally pulls back to the “one” chord. Try it, play Dmajor to G major, then play D7 to G major. It’s a “satisfying sound” to the ears.
Let me know if this is helpful, and if you want to go on a bit more.