“Major seventh” is the major chord with the major 7th added on. In E major, you might get a lot of EMaj7 chords, E G# B D#.
If you know the major scale, you know, “do re me fa so la ti do,” it’s the “ti” there. All it is is the seventh note of the major scale, that’s all. (And a major 7th chord would just be a chord with the major 7th on top of it.)
As to your question as how to noodle around with a groove, that’s what your pentatonic scales help you with. It reduces your note choices to 5 notes, and you really can’t play a “wrong” note if you stick to them over a simple rock groove.
It really is a matter of diving in and playing, as well as learning basic licks to help you out when you’re running out of ideas or need to connect two ideas together. Like, when I started, I had no fricking clue what I was doing. Improvising just seemed like magic to me. Then I learned a blues progression and the blues scale. Maybe even a lick here and there. So I just plodded along playing a simple comp in the left hand and noodled around with the blues scale. The nice thing about the blues scale is that you don’t have to change it over the chords. You can play the same scale over any of the chords in a blues progression, although you’ll soon figure out certain “target” notes sound better than others at different points in the progression.
And, of course, like NAF said above, listen to other players and try to imitate their licks and runs. And don’t be afraid to look up youtube videos. They are a wonderful resource for learning.
But, in the end, for me, at least, there was just a lot of diving in and trial and error. Before learning the blues scale and improvising, I was 100% a “by the book” type of classical player who pretty much only read sheet music (and picked out the very occasional tune by ear, but typically I would try to find the sheet music for it.) Now, I’m almost the opposite.
The chord you described is built on the 7th of the scale, and the two variants you mentioned are called “diminished 7th” for the one that’s 3 half steps everywhere, and “half-diminished 7th” for the one that has 4 half steps at the end.
Chord symbols: diminished 7th has a little circle like °7, half-diminished has a little slash through the little circle.
I know, right?! Like they think Piano Face* or Bass Face** could ever beat Guitar Face***. Ha! I say.
*studied intensity, raised-eyebrow lightness through the romantic bits
**no expression whatsoever, fingers a blur.
***do I really need to describe it, orgasm and all? 
Okay this is new, I can understand this. This is the first thing between A) play the highly arranged charts in front of you exactly as written and Z) sit down and randomly hit keys until you figure out how to play improvisations. I get the concepts, I understand the difference between a note and a lick and a riff. I get to copy the masters until I know what they know and can become a master myself. I can even understand why I would need to learn a variety of licks and riffs so I do not rely upon the ‘go to’ solution and start sounding the same. I have known keyboard players who sound remarkably similar every time they solo and at the end of every song they play.
I do have a few questions, can licks and riffs consist of chords or must they be single notes played mostly in quick succession? When Jerry Lee Lewis plays those chords in his right hand, are those licks? I am not sure if Great Balls of Fire is just broken chords, but for a fact In the Mood is just the I, IV, and V chords played melodically. Can a lick be a combination of notes and chords? Could a lick be a run of notes in a specific direction that culminates in a chord?
A question I often ponder, but then forget until the next time it occurs to me, is about single note instruments. Do horn players think and play in terms of chords? Or for the most part do they concentrate on runs and frills in whatever key they happen to be playing. It seems unlikely in terms of quickly paced music, but for a slow, soulful piece of music, I could imagine a brass or reed player choosing the 3rd or the 5th of whatever the lead horn player is doing to either harmonize with him, or create a sort of chord. I know that happens in arranged music where they have three parts for an instrument, in my kids band music they will have the trombones (and maybe a tenor sax) play tied whole notes in a chord while a higher instrument will play a melody above it. Does that ever happen in an improvisational setting?
This gives me some next steps to try, and perhaps what’s and why’s will become known to me once I understand how to. Also, thank you for understanding some meaning behind my not quite a question.
Okay, I should have figured out the diminished thing. A chord cannot be diminished and Major, duh. Please forgive my ignorance but I think I have this one now—just not what it means or how it is used. The Major seventh in E is an example of what I would call a root chord with the fourth note (the leading tone- either above or below) added in. But the IV chord and the V chord in a Major scale are also Major chords and a seventh could be added on to either of them and be a Major seven chord, correct? Does Major seventh refer only to the Root chord, or to all Major chords in that key?
I think I have the major seventh now, please check me above. Somewhere I have a chord chart that is the back page of a music book that was in a box of old music books I bought. The book is called something like Easy to Play Modern Music. It has a simple one note melody written for the treble clef, and then just chords above each measure. I thought it would be a wonderful tool for learning how to improvise and learn chords. The chart at the back has all twelve keys and gives four chords for each: Major, minor, Major 7th, minor 7th—and they are mostly inverted so the root note is on top, but not all of them. Rather than learning mad jazz chops, we learned how to play boring whole notes in the left hand for four counts while the right hand played the simple melody. It was a bitter disappointment, but I do have a chart of all Major (and minor for that matter) seventh chords. I imagine it would be easy to play them in any inversion—I just don’t know where or why to play them unless sheet music tells me to. But learning to play other people’s riffs and licks may teach a thing or two about that.
I have noticed how the blues scale is quite flawless (I think it must be a little different because it has six notes- not five), every note sounds good no matter what. Are you also saying that when the music moves to the IV or to the V, you don’t have to change the right hand at all?!? That you can just play the root pentatonic scale throughout the whole song without regard to chord changes in the left hand? I just assumed when there was a chord change, all hands changed chords. (The scale I learned years ago—the day after my very first lesson is: minor third, whole, half, half, minor third, whole. The piano teacher begged me to drop it until I knew more about music [by which she meant classical music], but she didn’t know any more about that scale than I did and she had a four year degree from a real university.) I do have to sort of run through the scale in the three chords typical of blues tunes unless they are C, F, and G which almost all of them seem to be in the music I find. I guess that is because it is piano music—I believe E and A are more typical for guitar music. At first I just ran the scale up, then down trying to put dramatic or at least musical pauses in the right places. Then I tried stuff like root- second , root-third, root forth, etc. and again going down. Just recently, I figured out that as long as you skip a note of the scale you can play two notes together to make a sort o chord. Three notes together works less often than it works- but I figure there might be a place for that cringey sound if you are trying to build to something, but that is still WAY beyond me. I tried to pick four notes of the scale and play them call and response (like I see broken chords sometimes used in written jazz or rock) like fingers 1&4 alternating with 2&5 but every time I think it might work, I get called away and never have made something I really like. The thing is if I really try, I can make a few moments at a time that don’t sound bad interspersed with unpleasant sounds that even distortion and attitude can’t hide. I can’t imagine even the most gifted and accomplished musicians in the land making me sound good in a group setting. Below I will link to the level I desire to play, the level I consider professional (well, I am almost 60 years old—the level I want my kid to achieve and be able to play routinely).
You have mentioned your metamorphous as a musician before and that is why I hold you as a role model. Truly, anyone who actually knows what the fuck they are doing when they sit down to play music is a golden god to me. I understand how a symphony with pages and pages of sheet music and endless rehearsal sessions can play together; although I have seen musicians who have never played together sit down and create amazing and beautiful music (with an occasional clanger—I assume when someone stretches a bit too far)—I literally cannot see a way to ever achieve that myself or how they managed to achieve it. As you said it is magic.
I watch the documentary on The Wrecking Crew and ache to be able to understand and play with practice what they just create nonchalantly. (I had a distant relative who played violin in LA before the Crew came on the scene and he was exactly what they described; button-down, hyper proper , professional in a persnickety manner, and dripping with disdain for these ‘hippies’. His daughter’s house is littered with gifts from Sinatra and Tony Bennett and the like. He was the concert master for the Oscars for years (and I avoided him like the plague when they came to town- dreading the possibility he would decide to give us a mini-concert in his sister in laws parlor. It was even worse when he and my grandfather [who also played violin] would play a duet. Boy, what I wouldn’t give to hear them play again!! There is a funny story attached to the two of them; first, the two musicians married easily the two most beautiful of six sisters who drew pretty deep water in their little town in western Pennsylvania. But there is a picture of them standing together with their violin cases long before they were related through marriage, for some reason every household in my family had a framed copy of that photo. So shortly after I was married, my wife discovered the photo in someone’s house back east. She pulls me over and says: “That is your grandfather!?!” “yes?” “And that is Maria’s dad!!?” “yes, so” “I knew your family was mobbed up!! You promised me……” No, no, the cases actually held instruments- they both played violin. This is them coming out of a rehearsal for the local symphony long before they married sisters.” She remained suspicious until we got back to California where we lived and she saw the thank you notes from Sinatra and the whole scrap book documenting Uncle Joe’s career in Hollywood.
Here is a link to the kind of musician I wish I bothered to try to become before I became too old—and what I still hope for my kid. (I was fifty when I had my first music lesson.) I am sure they had some discussion before the cameras rolled, but I am fairly certain they put together a tune and were ready to roll tape within a half hour. Is it possible they knew a week ahead of the session and all secretly reviewed the song they knew they were going to “choose” in the session and that is all a put-on for the camera? I picked a tune you had steered me too previously:
Man, that’s a lot of text. Guitarists aren’t capable of that much detail. That must be piano player text!!
Seriously, I know maj7 chords because sometimes I have to add my middle finger to the barre chord I am playing in a 7 shape, but I realize Jimmy Page was getting fancy on me and I have to add that finger. Beyond that, I try not to think about it.
What you are looking for are arpeggios that you add into your runs. Not that there aren’t other solos that do this but learning the solo to Aqualung is what taught me how those work in a solo setting. See also many electric blues greats. You can also dig into the theory behind playing interval improv vs scale improv and mixing and matching but that’s improvisation 102. Start with 101. Learn the pentatonic scales and your arpeggios, copy others who’s sound you like and then take it apart to figure out why you like it. Try to put it back together a little differently.
This is jazz talk. Above my pay grade. But listen to so. E bebop sometime.
I’m just going to concentrate on this question. You don’t have to change the notes you’re using, but you will change what your “target” notes are.
Here, I quickly recorded an example called “Blue Cheese”, as it’s a bit of a cheesy cliche blues solo, but it sticks completely to only playing the tonic blues scales notes in the organ solo. The only notes that are used are C, Eb, F, Gb, G, Bb, unless instinct kicked in and I smeared some other notes in there, but, so far as I can tell, I kept it completely limited to those notes.
Alright, a short question I am still not sure about. (And this demonstrates why I cannot ‘jam’; all these questions have to addressed, and ideally answered, before I can play a note. My little pea brain requires lots of guidance to make decisions.)
A Major seventh is any Major chord with four notes (although my music books claim dominant sevenths can be and should be the one, three, and seven- skipping the fifth. Alfred’s Basic Book of Scales, Chords, Arpeggios, & Cadences).
The examples that have been made in this thread so far are always the root chord. When a rock musician speaks of Maj 7th, does that include the four and five chord adding the fourth note (the subdominant and dominant) as well as the root in Major keys?
If you are playing in F Major, F, A, C, E is a Major seventh. Is the B flat chord and C chord with the leading tone added also a Major seventh? Or only the root chord?
It can be any chord in the key. All that “major 7th” means is that the you build a triad off the root note and add the major 7th/leading tone on top. In the key of C, the “natural” major 7th chords are C (C-E-G-B) and F (F-A-C-E). But if you wanted to, for some reason, through in a G-B-D-F# in there, it would be called a Gmaj7 chord.
I think where you are getting confused is with terminology “dominant seventh.” It can be used in a couple of ways. So far as I can tell, you are thinking of it as the V7 chord, which is the classical definition of it, but the terminology has gotten imprecise, so “dominant seventh” can mean any seventh chord with a minor seventh in it, to distinguish it from a “major seventh” chord.
No clue. I rarely play maj7’s when I am jamming. Getting a bunch of newly-together musicians to jam and then trying to intro fancy chords is a recipe for clusterfuckiness. That’s the technical term.
See my overthought notes earlier. THAT is stuff worth overthinking when it comes to jamming. How to lay down a groove and communicate.
Start with much simpler songs, Dude! The fancy chords will come AFTER you figure how how to play together.
If you’re only using notes in the major scale, a 7th chord (4 note chord that uses every second note starting on a specified note) on the I or IV will be a major 7 and a 7th chord on the V will be a dominant 7th. Is that what you’re asking?
ETA if you’re playing blues you can and should use dominant 7ths on the I and IV but now you’re using notes not in the major scale.
Yes! I absolutely believed the V7 is the very definition of dominant seventh. I also believed it has a specific role in classical music by being used to resolve to the tonic – or continue to build tension by NOT resolving to the tonic.
What I am understanding from this new information is that any chord in the scale that has a flated seventh (full step to the octave) is a dominant seventh?? If the chord itself was minor or Major before adding the seventh?
You should write a book called: HOW REAL MUSICIANS WHO DO NOT HAVE LONG WHITE HAIR AND VELVET PANTALOONS USE MUSICAL TERMS
There is nothing complicated about a major seventh chord. AMaj7 and DMaj7 are two of the easiest chord shapes to play on a guitar. And you can also slide the AMaj7 shape up to the seventh fret to get an awesome-sounding A6 voicing.
The AMaj7 chord shape looks like this (numbers represent the frets) :
E (open)
B (2)
G (1)
D (2)
A (open)
E (open or muted)
Nothing complicated.
This I understand completely, I don’t even need accompaniment to achieve clusterfuckness-- manage it all the time.
My brain works a little differently than most and the compensations I rely on are failing me in the pursuit of music. First I think slowly so I need to be very familiar with the material to keep up. Second, I suffer from Kelly Bundy brain, I can hold up to four things in my brain-- but if I am required to use those four things in any order but the order I am holding them my mind goes blank (it is not a short term memory problem, it is called functional memory deficiency-- as long as I treat them as a group I can recall them, if I focus on one specific item the other three disappear). Lastly, I sometimes get a crippling fear of getting caught on a technicality. When that happens I can’t consider jamming, I can barely play well rehearsed and known music – and even that has a mission impossible, high stakes feel to it. (It sure can make you focus though!)
Usually I can compensate for all those challenges by knowing what to expect and being familiar with the tools available. If I know I understand it, I don’t have to recall how or why it works, I can rely on the fact that if I needed to I could sit down and figure it out. So far I don’t have enough understanding to “just play a riff”. Improvising music is too damn complex, I give up on the dream a dozen times a day. But now I am going to try working on copying others and becoming very familiar with the elements. If I focus on those five (or six) simple notes, times a few octaves, and learn how others used them – I can see a path to the goal. It is a way better option than buying everyone sheet music for a specific tune, giving it to them, then asking them to go home and rehearse for a week or two - - so we can reconvene in the future and play one song together?!? Hell you could launch a new nation faster!
To tell you the truth, I can’t even “jam” alone. If I ever get to a place where I can noodle around on the keys and make something that . . . . (it doesn’t even have to sound good or innovative- it has to make sense in some mathematical way) It doesn’t have to be right— it has to not be wrong. I am okay with hitting the wrong key-- I am not okay with not knowing why it is the wrong key. If I could do that while home alone, I wouldn’t hesitate to communicate to a groove with others. The thing is- I AM that limited.
If you have to suffer from a brain condition related to the name Bundy, you could do worse than that one.
Alright, okay, I think I am getting this: dominant is as opposed to Major. A Major seventh is a half step below the tonic, a dominant is a full step below the tonic. The V7 is a dominate seventh because it is flatted by the key signature, and then as Pulykamell explains, it applies to any seventh that is flatted.
Have I got it?
You’re right on the money there. Don’t even think of it as “flatted by the key signature”. Just focus on those first two sentences you wrote.
ANY TIME you want to “dominate” a chord, just throw in whatever note is one whole step back from the root. Some people call it a blue note, some people call it a kaiser blade…I mean, some people call it a flat seventh, I just call it badass, because that’s what it sounds like.
A dominant chord also makes a good “passing chord” to transition from one major chord to another, but we’ll get into that later. You’re getting it. You already KNOW this stuff intuitively, you just need the vocabulary to discuss it.