True, although certain chord patterns do become standard, even cliche. The I - flat VII - IV - I pattern we’ve been talking about was pretty much overworked to death by the time the Marshall Tucker Band used it for their insipid '70s rock ballad Can’t You See.
In classical theory, the modifier “7” generally refers to the diatonic seventh unless otherwise noted. So the I[sup]7[/sup] chord is a major-major seventh (e.g. C-E-G-B). If you want a major-minor (or dominant or whatever you want to call it) on the I chord, you need to indicate it thus: I[sup]b7[/sup].
I always thought that if we say “seventh” chord – e.g., C7, we mean a chord based on the interval of the seventh, counting from and including the tonic note that gives the chord its letter name, with the caveat that by default we mean the flatted 7th note. If it’s not flatted then we’re talking about a seventh major and have to write C7Maj. Chords normally have at least three tones that define them: the chord’s tonic (the note that gives it its letter name), a minor or major third that provides the minor or major quality of the chord, and then at least one other note, like the seventh, that gives the chord its full qualification. So, for example, if you go to your piano and hit middle-C, E, and B-flat, you’re playing C7. If you change the E to E-minor (“strain to change from major to minor”), you’ll have a C-minor-7.
By contrast, when we’re talking about chords based on notes that are stated intervals from the tonic, isn’t it just a “four” chord, or a “two” chord, or what have you? Normally the chords would be formed from the notes of the scale that you’re working from, so if you’re playing a song in A-minor using dorian mode, your II chord is B-minor, III is C-major, and so on. Dorian mode starts on the second note of a major scale, so in this case the VII chord would be G-major. But we don’t call that the seventh chord, it’s just “seven chord”.
So in sum I’m not sure I see the ambiguity here.
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It’s usually written CMaj[sup]7[/sup] or CMaj7, not C7Maj. ETA: Thought of one more notation: CΔ7. Don’t know how common this is, but that’s what my jazz teacher used, and I’ve seen it around elsewhere.)
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You mean the E to E-flat. You’re changing the C to C minor. Or the major third to the minor third. But you wouldn’t refer to the note itself as E minor.
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Yes, good point. You would refer to it by its cardinal number, not ordinal. The vii[sup]o[/sup] or VII or whatnot would never be refered to as the “seventh chord.” It’s a seven chord.
It’s very common in jazz. Systems I have seen are:
CΔ7, Cm7 or Cmin7
CM7, Cm7
CMaj7, Cmin7
I know a pro who uses some music software that also renders the following, which I hate:
CMaj7, CM7 [small uppercase M for minor 7th)
One of the main problems with this issue, and so many others relating to music terminology, is that the “source” for most of the terms being used goes back centuries and usages have branched off from then in many directions, to the point that the “authority” (if one exists) depends on your genre of choice.
I remember when I first saw a guitar chord book at age 12 or so, that the idea of a “7th” chord was totally weird to me. Over the intervening 55+ years, by way of all sorts of reading, I have learned that there are dozens of “7th” chords.
What still has me confounded and unable to make sense of it all are such things as:
and many others.
Seventh Chords, in spite of their variety, are relatively easy to relate to now for me. But I won’t even try to point to an “authority” who has it all down to a clear answer.
Folks with minimal music education have an understanding of sorts, as do college professors in Music Education. Rarely will two versions match completely. The good part is that when you play a seventh chord (one of them) you can hear the difference(s) between them and can make your fingers (or lips) do what it takes to make the sounds.
I think the terminology for this has been relatively consistent. A 7th chord is just a triad with a seventh on top. The seventh can be major, minor, or diminished. The only confusing one, I think is the diminished seventh.
Not sure if everything’s been answered and resolved yet, but I did want to mention that it is important not to confuse functional harmony as used in classical musicology, with pop/rock/jazz conventions and symbols of the 20th century.
The former uses roman numeral analysis which define the actual “function” of the harmony. Thus, I = tonic, V = dominant, etc.
Historically as tonality developed, the V chord was the first which started to include 7ths. (you’ll find very few major or minor 7th chords before the 19th century). The 3rd and 7th of the dominant 7th chord forms a tritone which creates the tension that resolves so well to the tonic. So yes GaryT, in general when discussing music in the classical tradition, pre-20th century, the term “dominant” and V are more tightly linked.
In fact, Zeldar, the Augmented 6th chord kinda emphasizes this point. It is essentially a dominant chord (enharmonically), and most jazz musicians would probably think of it as such. But functionally, it’s a pre-dominant. It gets us to the dominant in a somewhat more striking way than with a normal diatonic pre-dominant. In a classical piece of music it’s written with an augmented 6th instead of a minor 7th (though they’re enharmonically the same note), and the augmented 6th resolves up (whereas a minor 7th would resolves down)
E.G
In the key of C major, an augmented 6th chord would be (Ab, C, F#). The Ab resolves down to G, and the F# resolves up to G, and the whole chord resolves to a G Dominant chord. This is quite different than if it would be written as a dominant chord (Ab, C, Gb) which would resolve to a Db chord.
In pop, rock, jazz, etc. (20th century music), when we’re reading the music on the page (instead of doing a functional analysis), the convention is, when we have (letter)(7, 9, or 13) it’s a dominant chord. (C7, A9, D13). If there’s nothing in between the letter and the number, it’s dominant (with the exception of 6. That is, C6 = C major triad with a major 6th). And yep, it’s perfectly OK to refer to them as dominant chords even though they may not be functioning as such. In fact, the mixolydian mode (based on a dominant harmony) can also be referred to as the dominant scale. Take that scale and raise the 4th, you have what’s commonly called the lydian-dominant scale (probably because it sounds better than the “lydian-mixolydian scale”).
As mentioned, the blues is based almost exclusively on dominant harmonies. It’s not tonal, and so it wouldn’t make much sense to use tonal functional harmony to analyze it (at last past a certain point). Since most of the rock of the 60s came from the blues, it makes sense that that general sound would be common, hence the common I - bVII - IV which is not tonal, but modal (mixolydian).
Nice analysis, Moe. Question though on the bII7/augmented sixth (interesting, I just commented on this a few hours ago in the blues riff thread). In the jazz context, would you really think of it as pre-dominant? It’s quite often a tritone substitution for the V7 and resolves down to the I. (The 3rd and 7th–the tension notes–are the same in the bII7 and V7, but in a different order.) Wouldn’t it just be functioning as dominant in that case?
I think you might be confusing 2 different things. A triad built on the bII (typically no 7th) is the * Neopolitan chord* (also a pre-dominant) in classical functional harmony.
The Augmented 6th chord is built on the b6 scale degree (in C major it would be built on Ab). But yes, you can absolutely think of it as a tri-tone sub, but for V of V, not just V.
E.g. In C major, an Ab7 chord is a tri-tone sub for D7 which is the dominant of G.
Missed the edit window but I just wanted to add:
Yes, a bII7 that resolves down to I is indeed a tri-tone sub for V. I just wanted to make the distinction between that and an augmented 6th chord which really is kind of a special chord in classical music.
I was thinking about flat VII chords in Rock N Roll right before this post. My list for I-flatVII-IV-I was “Born on the Bayou” “Good Times, Bad Times” “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Can’t Explain”. Can’t immediately come up with many examples of the flatVII outside of that progression, though.
And the I7 chord was around in popular music before the Beatles, in the folky-bluesy tradition. The traditional (covered by the Grateful Dead) “Dark Hollow”, or Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)” both use it to set up a temporary resolution to the IV.
As far as terminology goes, there’s what’s logically consistent, and what’s useful in everyday conversation. And since actual music of almost any western genre uses hundreds of flat-7th chords for every major-7th chord, it’s most useful to refer to the flat-7th as just plain ‘7th’ and use ‘major-7th’ when you want the rarely used variant. Kind of like you wouldn’t specify a right-hand threaded bolt; you’d only mention the handedness if it was the unusual left-hand thread.
I never said it was “ambiguous”…I always understood the difference between “seven” (i.e., VII – say, a B-major chord in a C-major song), and “seventh” (e.g., C7 being a C major chord with a B-flat added, at least in common rock/jazz notation).
I was just wondering why the same number – seven(th) – was being used for two different intervals.
You folks explained this well, to sum:
- The chord marked with a bare 7 (e.f., “C7”) in rock and jazz is really just one of several types of sevenths, but because of how music happened to develop, this particular one (the “dominant seventh”, with an added eleventh-half-step note) just came to be the one that is otherwise “unmarked”, by convention.
- The “VII” chord will be rooted in the seventh whole tone of the scale of the song. So, for a song in C major, the “otherwise unmarked” VII is rooted in B (the twelfth-half-step note). (Thus, the “flatted VII”* is *marked, because it’s a modal thing, resurrected in some rock songs as a substitute for V – as Moe and I pointed out.)
Thanks again, and over and out…
Right on…The Who’s Can’t Explain popped into my head, too, and it was released about half a year before She Said She Said, I think.
There are plenty of rock songs which just go back and forth between I and flat-VII, though, witout ever going to IV. My favorite is Frank Zappa’s Inca Roads – the beautiful guitar solo, that is. A good example of harmonic simplicity in part of a song balancing the overall complexity of the rest.
No, I’m not thinking of the Neapolitan chord (which is a specific inversion of the bII and doesn’t have the augmented sixth/minor seventh), but I thought that the bII7 can be thought of an augmented sixth. Wikipedia seems to support this.
This is how I’ve understood it, but augmented sixths have always been a weird point in theory for me. I understand that in their pre-dominant role, they’re on the minor sixth, but in a dominant role (as often in jazz), they’re on the minor second. Or would you not consider the bII7 in a bII7-I progression as technically an augmented sixth borrowed?
I guess in the end it really doesn’t matter to me, but I’d like to be clear on these points, as augmented 6ths are not something I typically deal with.
Not quite. In C-Major, the “seven chord” is not the VII chord, but the vii[sup]o[/sup] chord. It is spelled B-D-F.
Here’s another place where some of the posters are confused: any time someone writes or says D7 or Eb7, for instance, they MEAN a dominant 7th chord with that letter as the root. So you could be in, say, the key of C and someone can say, “Here, there’s an A seventh chord,” and they mean that there’s a chord that’s made up of A, C#, E, and G, *even though *there’s no C# in the key of C. In a score or lead sheet, they’d write it as A7. If they mean to refer to the natural seventh chord that starts on A and resides in the key of C (the vi chord), they’ll write it a mi 7, and refer to it as an a minor seventh chord.
Actually, it would appear you’re correct. I never came across augmented 6ths with a root on the bII but there’s even a Schubert example on the wiki page so this did exist. In any case, like you, augmented 6ths have always been kinda weird to me too.
Ignorance fought!
In a sense, you are both referring to the same “problem”: that casual musicians, including most rock musicians, when referring to a chord by some interval relative to the root note of the tonic of a song (wither as an entire single chord in a sequence, e.g., “seven”, or a note added to some chord to change its feel, e.g., “seventh”) do *not *account for how the notes which make up that new chord will “be different” depending on what key (and what scale of that key) the song is in. (I put “be different” in quotes, because the intervals which make up these chords are actually consistent – they just SEEM inconsistent to the casual observer.)
So, in practice, Pulykamell, the difference between VII and vii[sup]o[/sup] is ignored, a VII in a C-Major song is assumed to be a regular B Major triad, and if anything else is meant, it will be stated (B minor 7th, B diminished, etc.)
And again, in practice, it’s just as CC put it: which notes are “in” or “not in” the scale of the tonic of a song is ignored; each chord, when adding “7”, etc. to, is treated as if it were an isolated thing.
(Another example might be enharmonics – A rock musician doesn’t care if a C chord in some song is “actually” a B-sharp, according to the textbook rules of the particluar harmonic progression. It’s just a C chord!)
I guess that, for one thing, this makes transposing easier. But I’m starting to understand how, technically speaking, it’s incorrect.
Well I’m with you up to a point here. As pulykamell mentioned, the correct chord built on the 7th scale degree would be conventionally written as viio. (with the little circle as a superscript. Not sure how to do that) and it would be built on the 7th note of the major scale. If you’re building a chord on a note not in the diatonic scale than you need an accidental in front of the roman numeral, just like you would a note. So yes, a Bb major chord in Cmajor is functionally a bVII. It is in this case modal, but I wouldn’t think of it as a substitute for V. (actually viio is more typically a substitute for V because it has the leading tone and the active diminished 5th which resolves to I). I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m splitting hairs too much, but when you say “substitute for V” you’re thinking tonally but the music is modal.