In this lesson, we will be looking at a set of seven chords.

Below, I will list the name of each chord followed by the notes of that chord in their proper order, below that I will give a tabbed example, and below that I will give the actual ordering of the notes in the tabbed example. This way you can compare each tabbed example's note order to the proper order of notes next to the chord name to insure that each chord has all the required notes in them, even though the notes of the tabbed example will be out of order. Now, if you are in doubt, you can always use what you learned about the Chromatic scale to identify each note in each tabbed example to insure that everything is correct below. In fact, I encourage it, simply because it is good practice.


C Major 7th C, E, G, B
[A3i, D5r, G4m, B5p]
[C, G, B, E]


D minor 7th D, F, A, C
[A5i, D7r, G5i, B6m]
[D, A, C, F]


E minor 7th E, G, B, D
[A7i, D9r, G7i, B8m]
[E, B, D, G]


F Major 7th F, A, C, E
[A8i, D10r, G9m, B10p]
[F, C, E, A]


G Dominant 7th G, B, D, F
[A10i, D12r, G10i, B12p]
[G, D, F, B]


A minor 7th A, C, E, G
[A12i, D14r, G12i, B13m]
[A, E, G, C]


B half diminished 7th B, D, F, A
[A14i, D15r, G14m, B15p]
[B, F, A, D]


Using the C major 7th as an example, the proper ordering of the notes in this chord was C, E, G, B. However, when building this chord on the guitar neck across four strings, we find that the E note gets reordered to the end of the chord spelling and we get C, G, B, E. In fact, you will notice that the notes that compose all the chords above get reordered this way. This is a helpful detail to be aware of when trying to build your own 7th chords. Because of the way the guitar is tuned, this becomes a convenient way to view how 7th chords are constructed on the middle four strings of the guitar.

At this time, I would like to provide you with a couple of notes to remember.

Note 1: A Dominant 7th chord, such as G Dominant 7th above, can simply be written as G7.

Note 2: A half diminished chord, such as B half diminished above, can also be refered to as a B minor 7 flat 5 chord, since it is just a minor 7th chord where the fifth is flatted.

Now, of course a distinguishing feature about all the seven chords listed above is that they all contain notes in the C major scale. We constructed each chord simply by taking a note from the C major scale, such as C, and by skipping over the next note in the C major scale (namely D), we got E, then repeating this process we got G and B. Once we had obtained four notes our job was done.

For homework, I want you to practice playing each chord in order and becoming very familiar with its shape. Because it is very useful to know what kind of chord you are playing by its shape. And even though we learned seven chords here, there are only four different chord types (namely, Major 7th, minor 7th, Dominant 7th, and half diminished (or the minor 7 flat 5 chord)). Also, remember that you can play each chord by moving it up the neck in half steps, so in learning these four chord shapes, you have really learned 48 chords in totality. Which is a decent number of chords to have in one's chord vocabulary.


Corey J. Bray