Learn Diatonic Scales & Harmonies for the Jazz Guitar

Video Transcript

"My name is Jim Dufresne and I'm here to tell you about jazz guitar. Diatonic chord scales. Remember that our major scale, we'll start with C Major, the notes are numbered... 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15. Chords are built in thirds, so we'll start , we will call that number 1 or the tonic, 1-2-3, the third one up is our third, what a great name for a third. 1-2-3-4-5... another third ...6-7. .gives us our major 7... there's our major 9th...10th, there's our 11th, and you can actually stack these triads on top of each other, like that in an arpeggio fashion. When we see the name of a chord, Cmaj7, it tells you how to make that chord because it is just a major C chord, CEG, with a major 7th on top, remember things are built in thirds. There is another kind of music that is built on fourths, quartal harmony, but we will talk about that on some future date. Diatonic harmony or tertial harmony is music that is built in thirds, which is about 99.9% of the music that you're familiar with... country music, blues music, jazz music, popular music, music from Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, most anything you've ever heard deals with tertiary or diatonic harmony. An example of quartal harmony would be (plays). That sounds familiar because that would be the opening bars to the theme from Star Trek. That is done in quartal harmony. So there's this science fiction show talking about the future and then the composer was ingenious enough to use a different form of harmony to give it a futuristic sound."