Note: in all of these examples, the inversions don’t matter. And any notes mentioned can be doubled. Or even tripled, but you’d have to have at least ONE of them. m=minor, M=major.
An X major chord is the root, the major 3rd (M3), and the perfect 5th (P5). It would be referred to and notated as an “X”
An X minor chord is the root, the minor 3rd (m3), and the P5. It would be referred to as an X minor and notated Xm.
An X seventh chord is the root, the M3, the P5, and the minor 7th (m7). It would be referred to and notated as X7.
An X minor seventh chord is the root, the m3, the P5, and the m7. It would be referred to as a X minor seven and notated as Xm7
An X major chord with a major seventh is the root, the M3, the P5, and a major 7 (M7). It’s called an X major 7 and notated Xmaj7.
So, there’s a chord with a root, a m3, a P5, and a M7. What is it called? An X minor major 7? X minor add 7? Xmmaj7? Xm add 7?
I’ve only ever known it as a minor major seventh chord. The “minor” referring to the third, while the “major” refers to the seventh. C-Eb-G-B, for example (which would be a i[sup]7[/sup], diatonic in C harmonic minor).
That wikipedia page also notates the chord I describe as Cm[sup]M7[/sup], which I think is a more direct answer to your question. There are several notation systems floating around, and it’s been years since I studied them in any depth. As a tuba player I can only handle one note.
I’m already in way over my head, but apparently it’s not terribly common in many genres.
Hmm, past majors and minors, I tend to call everything else “the Jimi Hendrix Chord” or “one of those jazz chords”
I was figuring out the riff to Miles Davis’ song So What off Kind of Blue - Bill Evans, that piano playing atmospheric genius, stacked up some funky notes to make the chords - I think it was all fourths. I can play it, but I could never name it
What you call a seventh chord is also called a major-minor seventh–in fact, that’s what we had to call them in first year music theory. (Second year, we were allowed to also call them dominant sevenths.)
I actually think the major seventh and minor seventh are actually major major seventh and minor minor seventh. We just omit the redundancy.
Yeah, that sounds right. The default triad is major. The default seventh is minor. So, if you say “C7” it’s a major triad with a minor seventh. If you say “C major 7th,” since the C is major by default, the “major” must be modifying the 7th, so it is a C major chord with a major 7th. C minor 7th would thus be interpreted as a C minor chord (since it’s not the default) with a minor seventh on top (which is the default 7th). If, like the OP, the triad is not the default (major) and the seventh is not the default (minor), then both are named, thus a C minor major seventh.
I wonder if that makes any sense, but that’s basically the gist of it.
This is the “dominant” 7th. So-called because it’s the 7th for the dominant harmony to the tonic. That is, if you’re playing in C major but play a G chord, with a 7th, and that 7th is a note in the C major scale, then the G is a G7, and G is the dominant (V-chord) to C. I probably got a bunch of the terms wrong, but that’s the core idea, as I learned it in the classic Harmony for Beginners.
An X minor seventh chord is the root, the m3, the P5, and the m7. It would be referred to as a X minor seven and notated as Xm7
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I don’t think so.
The chords are named after the modes. (Yes, the modes all also have Greek names, which is beside the point here.)
Modes are variations of scales when you start from a different key. That is, if you stick to the white keys on a piano, C major is all the white keys, starting from C.
A minor is all the white keys starting from A. (D “Dorian” minor is starting from D. Both A minor and D minor have the same 1,2,3,4,5, and 7, relatively speaking, but the 6 is natural Dorian and flat in “pure” or Aolean minor.) There are a bunch of other modes, all based on white keys but starting on a different one**. So, a minor chord is just a chord constructed using the minor mode. No need to repeat “major” and “minor”.
The CmM7 is an odd duck, because you can’t play it using all white keys in any scale. That is, it’s not based on a mode.
** Of course, all modes don’t use only white keys. The ones based on C major do. We can also have all modes based on C#, which would use all the black keys and a couple white ones, but the same ones for all modes based on C#M.
For folks who actually know music theory, forgive me for running roughshod over myriad details, and please correct any mistakes (fight ignorance!)
See? This is why low-rent musicians like me have a mental map that basically shows a diagram of:
Cowboy/Open Chords
Barre Chords
the Jimi Hendrix Chord
Jazzy Chords
…and all those Weird/Partial Chords that enable me to do cool stuff with my other fingers and open strings™.
That’s an official list, dammit.
Kidding aside, I know my music thinking and playing would be better if I understood theory in a more conversant way, but it has always felt like homework to me, and guitar has always represented the opposite to me. I really respect folks who have theory down…
No, BigT is correct, at least in classical theory. Triads are described according to quality (major, minor, diminished, augmented), and seventh chords are described according to both the quality of the triad, and the quality of the 7th (major/major, minor/minor, major/minor, minor/major, diminished/diminished, diminished/minor). They tend to also have shorthand designations: major/major is simply major, minor/minor is minor, diminished/diminished is full diminished and diminished/minor is half diminished (dominant 7th for major/minor is a tricky one, since “dominant” refers to a function rather than a chord quality; that is, you can have a major/minor 7th that is not functioning as a dominant).
Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s article on minor seventh chords, where you can see that they are referred to as minor/minor sevenths. There is a similar article on major sevenths.
The chord names are not related to the modes. In fact, in a sense they’re actually in opposition to each other (in classical theory anyway). The “dominant 7th” chord comes from the words we use to describe the different functions of each chord of the diatonic scale. “Dominant” refers to the function of the 5th chord, which is the only one spelled as such (major triad, minor 7th). We still use much of the terminology in modal music, but in this case it’s generally divorced from the larger concept of functional harmony.
The mM7 chord is the I chord of a tonal minor scale (i.e. harmonic or melodic minor, or more generally a minor scale altered to have a tonal leading tone).
