Easy Acoustic Guitar Lesson On How To Make Major Chords Fancy

Hey, how’s it going this is Sean Daniel with Guitar Control, we’re taking a look at all the major chords in E and extending them from a triad into their 7th chord so this is something that is really kind of easy to do conceptually you may learn a couple different chord voicing you have an experimented with you can change any single major chord of any song that you already know, songs that you’re maybe writing or something for your own compositions and give them a little more flavor a little more spice just two different chord voicing and then finding out the space between them the interval that they belong.

Click on the Tabs button to follow chords and tabs.

We’re going to start in the key of C, there are seven notes c, d, e, f, g, a, b, and then a lot of times you go back to that C again that’s an octave, so seven different notes three of those notes become major chords and in any key it’s always the 1st, 4th and 5th note of that key to become major chord so the major chords in the key of C the first one is C is the fourth note so that becomes a major chord and G also becomes a major chord right C F and G that’s why you’ll always see a C major chord with an F major chord with the G major chord in a lot of different songs.

There’s a couple different ways but there’s one tried-and-true way that we can make these chords a little more interesting and that’s by adding an extra note to them, so we’re going to start off really easily by making the C major chord. I’m going to take a regular C major chord voicing 3rd fret on the A-string 2nd from the D-string open G, 1st fret on the B-string, then open E-string and filling it up out a little bit more by taking a ring finger putting on the 3rd fret of the G-string to make it a G note and then your pinky is going to take over on the 3rd fret of the A-string so this is just a fuller sounding C major chord now if you pop your pointer finger off you get a C major seven chord, which has a very distinct sound some people think it’s pretty some people think it’s melancholy however you perceive it it’s something that you can always do to the C chord in the key of C.

Now what I want  to do is a non-open chord voicing I want to do something movable now when I say moveable it’s like okay this is great knowing that this is a C major seven chord but if I try moving this that sounds really bad it only sounds great right here for the most part okay so we’re going to take the 8th fret on the low E-string and make a chord voicing that looks like this my pointer finger is grabbing the C which is the 8th fret on the low E-string.

I’m going to skip the D’s there’s A-string all together jump to the D-string ring finger 9D right behind it 9G middle finger 8B, so this is a higher voicing of that C major seven down there okay now the great thing about this shape is totally movable all I have to do is know what note my pointer finger is touching and that’s going to be that notes major 7th chord so this is a C major 7 B major separately flat major 7 A major 7 A flat major G major E flat baby F major 7 this is the one that I want right here the one that’s rooted on the 1st fret of the low E-string like we said an F is another major chord in the key of C c, d, e, f, is the 4th note in that key so we can turn that into this board right here now the great thing is there’s a relationship between these two that we can really easily count off from the 8th fret or that C to the 1st fret.

Now we can start seeing the relationship interval why is it you can think of like from the 1st fret to the 8th fret you know if that’s like a 7th fret difference however you want to kind of perceive that as always give me the distance from the one chord to the floor or if we’re going down assuming we’re the key of C we’re going to add another one just like that, now that G chord right here it’s called a G7 chord the 5th note in any key c, d, e, f, g, it’s kind of special because when we try to make that a 7th chord it becomes a dominant 7th chord, so the seventh chord voicing only happens on that one scale degree in anything it’s going to look like this, this is going to be the chord voicing that we’re going to use you may have even played a G7 chord before open like this or even this is going to be that same chord but in a different spot.

We’re going to do this one right here again self-contained movable shapes my middle finger the 3rd fret of the E-string my pointer fingers on the 2nd presentation just like a G major chord but my ring finger is going to grab the 3rd fret of the D-string and then my pinky is going to grab the 4th fret of the G-string. So now this is a 4 note chord voicing it’s going to give you a dominant 7th chord just like I said whatever no you’re on that’s going to be its dominant 7 a G, G# 7, A# 7, E7 , so real quick let’s just talk about the distinction sonically between a major seven and a seven chord now let’s do them both on the c major seven down seven major seven they’re only one note difference and if you tell it’s going from here to here it’s called a flat seven down to seven quarters a flat seven you know if you’re not super interested in the theory that’s fine I personally think is kind of interesting to know all that stuff but which new I don’t know is the sound of it the sound of a dominant seventh chord always sounds unfinished until you get to the one chord okay so in the key of C G is 5 C is 1.

Alright now again the important part is having the distance between these chords down kind of memorize a little bit right so if you know this is the one chord eighth right you can always go back to one to find the four chord alright wherever you’re on the four chord two frets higher it’s going to be that dominant 7th chord okay so one four five chord progression is just like this however you want to solve it you know how you execute it it’s totally up to you but it’s good to be able to kind of see these in different locations now I want to do one more and use these same chord voicing or take the same chords and use them as different voicing routed on the a string okay we’re going to stick in the same key C major smells like this a string now is our root this is our Cu 3rd fret of the a string ring finger 5 D middle finger for G pinky 5b everything we’re going do here is contained these middle four strings now last time we went from a C backwards to enough now we’re going to go higher okay so the third fret of the a string is where my 1 or it is in the key of C you remember we said f is the 4 we just count through the major scale one two three four this the 8th fret here is the F so we can take that same chord voicing again 3, 5, 4, 5, if we slide it down that becomes 8 10 9 so from 3 five frets higher will be getting from the 1 and a key to the 4 and a key the same thing to the G the five but we’re going to slightly change what we did there okay remember we this is a major 7th chord G major 7 would be 10 12 11 12 which you can totally play it you can totally play AC major 7 F major 7 G major 7 and it’s not wrong but when you’re playing that G major 7 technically you’re introducing a note that is not in the key of C again it does really matter if it sounds good to you use it go for it there’s no music theory police they’re gonna arrest you by diatonic Lee speaking would be the name for using all the notes in the key and only the notes and the key to make your chords it would be 10 12 10 12.

Okay so that’s always gonna be two fronts higher than where the four chord was now we can start mixing and matching up a lot of these because again you may have noticed that first chord voicing we did the C major seven on the eighth writer might be easier to get to the F major seven just by going down a string C major seven half major seven instead of C major seven AB major seven now the advantage is you kind of get back slide so you want the slide if you want the efficiency it going down a string it’s really up to you this was kind of seeing these different major chord voicing seeing where they are relative to each other the best way to learn the fret board in my opinion one of the best ways you know I think once you kind of see them as these are the spots where you know in your mind’s eye these notes and light up no matter what key you’re in its greatly start making connections on the fret board that’ll really kind of take your plane to the next level maybe incorporating more major seven down to seven chords or something you want to do with existing songs really more power to you now you have the knowledge there’s no excuses which is why you click that link below to get all the stuff tabbed out for you.

Thanks for watching let me know if you guys have any questions I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can also in the meantime make sure you click on other videos around here by myself all the great instructors here on the guitar control channel always looking for your feedback so let us know what you want to see more of and we’ll talk to y’all seen it thanks a lot

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