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Easy Beginner Guitar Lessons – My first steps to learning minor seventh chords On The Guitar

By Mike Hayes | September 18, 2009

With so many chords to learn it’s hard to know where to start on
the guitar. The key is to know what each chord sounds like and
what effect it will have on your music.

A neat way to think of chords is to firstly know the basic chord
sounds which are: major, minor, augmented and diminished. We’ve
also talked about the dominant seventh chord  in previous articles as being important in our basic set of guitar sounds..

Once you know how to form these chord shapes on the guitar and
can recognize each chord’s distinctive sound it’s time to move
on to more complex harmonies.

Think of each chord as a color, sometimes you will want to soften
the color for a particular musical effect; in much the same way
as a stage manager creates different visual effects with stage
lighting in a concert hall or theatre.

Let’s say we wanted to soften a major chord, two chords that
would work nicely would be the major seventh or major sixth
chords.

In the case of a minor chord the most common substitution is the
minor seventh; let’s take a closer look at how this interesting
harmony is produced.

Minor seventh chords:

Chord construction formula: 1-b3-5-b7

Musical shorthand symbol: m7 (Cm7), (Gm7) etc

Beginning with an example using the C major scale as a starting
point we will create a C minor seventh chord.

C major scale: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C

Apply the minor seventh formula of 1-b3-5-b7; this means we would
extract the first, flattened third, fifth and flattened seventh
notes from our scale.

Resulting in the following spelling: Cm7 = C-Eb-G-Bb

Some additional examples of the minor seventh chord would be …

A minor seventh chord: Am7 = A-C-E-G

Derived from the A major scale; A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#-A by applying
our 1-b3-5-b7 formula we arrive at Am7 = A-C-E-G

E minor seventh chord: Em7 = E-G-B-D

Here’s how we spell the Em7 chord.

E major scale = E-F#-G#-A-B-C#-D#-E; apply the formula and there
we have it! Em7 = E-G-B-D

Some more examples …

Bm7 = B-D-F#-A

Gm7 = G-Bb-D-F

Dm7 = D-F-A-C

Fm7 = F-Ab-C-Eb

Who uses this chord? Everyone from Van Morrison (listen to
the introduction of Moondance for a great example of parallel
minor seventh chords Am7 to Bm7); to Dallas Green to Eric
Clapton and almost everyone in between … they’ve all used this exciting chord color to enhance their music at some point in their career.

Now for a musical example to see (or hear) this chord at work.

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door

Basic chords … |G /// | D /// | Am /// | Am /// ||

Substitute chords …| G /// | D/F# /// | Am7 /// | Am7 /// ||

Eric Clapton’s reggae version of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door has this substitute set of chords, see if you can spot the minor
seventh chord!

I invite you to use these tips and tools when you play the
guitar.

And now I’d like to invite you to get free access to my “How To
Remember 1,000 Songs” eCourse. You can download the course for
free at: http://www.guitarcoaching.com

From Mike Hayes – The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar
System

http://www.GuitarCoaching.com
http://AdvancingGuitaristProgram.com

Topics: Beginner Guitar Lesson, Guitar Chords, Guitar Tips | No Comments »

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