Playing Dominant 7th Guitar Chords

Series Summary

Learning how to play the guitar might garner you the respect and admiration of your friends, but it might also give you a rewarding passion that you can pursue over the course of a lifetime. In spite of the raw, sore fingertips and the daily practice routines, the guitar allows you to express yourself in new and exciting ways. And your ability will develop and mature from one level to the next, allowing you to work out more elaborate musical ideas. But this won’t happen by itself—if you want to get good, you have to play through the pain.

In these free guitar lessons on video, learn how to develop your skills even further. Our expert will show you how to play seventh chords, especially how to use them in chord progressions to create texture and tension. Mixing up your chord shapes and adding accents like a 7th chord can make the difference between boring and moving: it all depends on whether you know just what a 7th chord is. Take some time to watch these clips to learn what a i-iv-v7 chord progression sounds like. It may just be the sound you’ve been searching for.

Video Transcript

"In the previous segments, we covered our open major and minor chords, as many as we could for now without using bar chords. Now within those chords we can make seventh chords of each of those, both major and minor types. There will be new progressions such as making the five into a five-seven in the one-four-five turnaround. And making it, the five-seven after the one-two-six and five-seven turnaround. We'll also learn some new strumming patterns. So we all only just strumming down, we can strum up and down. We can mute, we can do different patterns and different rhythms in four-four and three-four. We can learn new picking patterns as well using our pick to alternate strings or go across them. And we could also do finger picking using the fingers on our right hand to pick the strings instead of using a normal pick. We'll also do a brief discussion about minor seventh chords and how to form those. And in later sections we'll be using those in our new songs. "