Diatonic Scales on a Sax: The Three Minor Seven Chord

Video Transcript

" For Expert Village this is Mitch Kaplan. In this segment, we will be talking about the diatonic scales and how they are connected and how you would improvise using them. The first section that we would talk about is, we would take the major scale, your C major scale, again using C, D, E, F, G, A, B and then C. Now what we do is again, we take the every other note just like what we did before, we built the chords, we talked about our major, we talked about our minor, our dominant and half diminished. Well now, we are going to see how that relates to the major scale. So we have our one, three, five and seven, now what we are going to do is just move up one step at a time and with our keeping our hands as exactly the same on the keyboard and what this does is this produces the diatonic scale going every other note. The first one, we actually have our major seven. It is also called the one major seven chord. The next one, moving up one, keeping our fingers every other step, we would create the minor seven and this is called the two minor seven. It is comprised of D, F natural, A and C natural. In a D major scale you would have F sharp and C sharp but because we keep it in consistent with the major scale of the C, we created a minor seven pattern. Moving up one major step, we now have a minor seven. This is called the three minor seven chord and what we do is, again we start with the E. Now if we were to have an E major scale, we would have four sharps F, C, G and D but because this is consistent again with the C major scale, we now have what is known as the three minor seven chord and it is a sadder sounding chord again and this what it sounds like. So we use our E, our G natural, our B and our D."