Shawn's Guitar Lessons

Here's a yob in the music field.

Do you like the maj7 chord?
Where is the best place to play one? Major 7's work really well on the iv chord(Lydian), which is one step backwards on the circle of fifths. If you move one step forward to your V chord(Mixolydian), you can play a Dominant 7 chord.

Also, did you know that there is a minor chord hiding in every major 7 chord? For instance in Fmaj7 the notes of the chords spell FACE. If we take the root note off, we are left with ACE, this spells out a minor chord. This minor chord is actually the relative minor of the key you are in. In this case, we are in the key of C. Then if we wanted to play a Dominant 7 chord, we would play G7.
A chord that doesn't work very well in it's own key because the 7th note is flattened. This happens because of the diatonic scale and going up in 3rds. As it spells out the notes GBDF, the F note is outside of its scale.
If we see a G7, we are most likely playing in the key of C, as becomes the resolving chord of G7.

We can do something else with these 7 chords using a Secondary Dominant. In this case we would put a secondary dominant between any two chords in a given key. The chord would be a Dominant 5th chord of whatever chord we are going to.
Whether it is major or minor, we always treat it like major.

So if we went from an Fmaj7 to an Am, we can put E7 in between these chords. It's a really neat trick that adds tension and release and may be the key ingredient to fresh ideas.

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Last minute stocking stuffer! I can send you a printable Gift Certificate for lessons. Please put it in a cool card or envelope, though. 😎

-Acoustic and/or Electric
-Any learning level. I work with complete beginners, as well as, working professional musicians.
-All ages, grade school to seniors.

Teaching the next generation of Rock Stars since 2010.