A short while ago, we asked users of our Chordelia: Triad Tutor app what they wanted to learn next. And the answer came back resoundingly:

Seventh chords!
It’s easy to see why. Seventh chords are versatile and can provide a wide variety of interesting sounds. They’re essential in jazz, and can add that special spice or sparkle to any music.

At a glance, they seem simple enough: a triad chord with an extra note added – the seventh of the scale.

But by varying the type of triad and the scale you can produce many types of seventh chord. Dominant, Minor, Major, Minor/Major, Diminished, and so on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, even before you try to tell them apart in context by ear!

Most musicians never get past the most basic grasp of seventh chords, and so limit their harmony skills by never moving beyond the core triads – or perhaps just learning the dominant seventh chord.

Our new app, Chordelia: Seventh Heaven, is the first dedicated tutor for seventh chords in the App Store and will teach you to hear all the important types of seventh chord easily and reliably – whether they’re played one note at a time or all together, and whichever inversion of the chord is used.

Why learn seventh chords?

If most musicians get by without ever really understanding seventh chords, why should you bother?

Well, if you’re a jazz musician you’ll already know the answer! For rich, interesting harmonies, seventh chords are where it’s at. You’d be hard-pushed to find a jazz standard which doesn’t utilise one or more types of seventh chord. By developing your ear to recognise seventh chords quickly and easily, you’ll be hugely increasing your potential as a player. Just ask the guys over at JazzAdvice.com!

Seventh chords aren’t just reserved for jazz though. Click to read the rest…

An appreciation of common musical genres in important for any musician, and guitarists in particular are often called on to provide accompaniment in a specific style at the drop of a hat. Today we’re going to look at jazz guitar ‘giveaways’: musical elements that characterise jazz, which you can use to recognise it – and jazz up your own playing!

Jazz guitar is somewhat atypical compared to most other guitar styles. It emphasizes pure technical ability less than rock and metal guitar do, but emphasizes music theory more. Perhaps this is because the jazz guitar style, at least in its basic form, developed before those other guitar techniques started to become popular. Not every jazz guitarist exactly follows the conventions of the genre. They commonly hybridize the jazz style with other genres, or use unusual aspects of music theory in their playing. Still, there are some aspects of jazz playing which set it apart from most other genres. We’ll look specifically at Seventh Chords and Bebop Scales.

Seventh Chords

The presence of seventh chords, particularly the dominant seventh, is one of the best indicators of a jazz song. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that seventh chords are extremely common in jazz chord progressions. In fact, many jazz songs use seventh chords exclusively in the chord progression. Another reason is that other modern styles of music rarely use any type of seventh chord. They do crop up in Classical, Baroque, and Renaissance music, but it does not take any real amount of ear training to distinguish between those styles and jazz! In addition, those styles more typically use the arpeggio, as opposed to jazz which uses the full chord.

Types of seventh chord

The following example contains several types of seventh chord. Compare the tone of these chords against the major and minor chords. Differentiating the seventh chords is not that difficult once you know what to listen for.

The most common types of seventh chords. Compare them with the major and minor chords.

Example chord progression

Click to read the rest…

Once we are reasonably comfortable with intervals and triads, we can start to work on seventh chords. You may recall that a seventh chord is a triad with an added seventh above the root. The most common seventh chord in western music is the dominant seventh chord.

Dominant Seventh Chords

In C major the dominant seventh pitches are G B D F, G to F being the seventh:

Dominant Seventh Chord

1. Dominant Seventh Chord

This chord is a major triad built on V with a minor seventh above the root. Its solfege is so ti re fa. First we will learn how to sing it. Click to read the rest…