Building the C7 Chord on the Guitar

Video Transcript

"MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. Now, we're going to take a look at the C7 chord, another commonly used chord. If you recall from our scale degree series, the way we build the seventh chord is we take our 1-3-5 just like we had in our major chord or scale degrees, and then we'll also going to add the 7 onto that 5. In the case of the seventh chords, we actually take our 7and we make it a flat 7 which means we take it down one step or on the guitar, it would be one fret, we drop it down, and we'll see that here. We have just, like our normal C chord; we got our C and our E, part of our C major chord. We've even got a high C up there. In this case, we actually took out the G was our fifth in the chord and that's actually okay to do. It's not one of the most important notes in our chord. People are still going to hear this and they still going to know it's a C chord even though it's missing the G note. Here, we're actually replacing it with a note B flat which if you look back, B is our seven in the scale degree in the key of C and then we make it flat. So it's a B flat in this case and if you look over here, you can see that we've got our 1, our 3 which was our E, we've got our high C up there and instead of the 5, we just put our flat 7 right there. It's on the same fret, third fret in this case as our one. When we're playing this, it's going to be played pretty similar to how we play our C major chord. We, basically, instead of leaving that third string open, we're just going to drop our pinky down right there on the third string on the third fret. And now, we going to play it, we've got our C7 chord with that flat 7 in there."