All About 7th Chords

1. Intro: Hey, and welcome to my course that is all about seventh chords. Whether you're hoping to become a better hip hop producer, start to introduce yourself to the language of jazz harmony or just generally sort of spice up your chord progressions a little bit, then this course is for you. Maybe you've heard about seventh chords or even started to explore them on your own, but you're not sure that you're approaching them from many different angles. This course is going to go over major seventh, minor seventh, minor major seventh, and dominant seventh chords in great detail so that you can really, truly feel like you have a deep understanding of each of these fundamental seventh chords. Now let's not forget minor seven flat five, diminished seventh chords, and the application of seventh chords in their native 251 environment. We're going to really make sure that we approach these seventh chords from enough angles so that whatever style you want to apply seventh chords to, you're coming in with some confidence. Now, the project for this course is quite simple. Take a chord progression that you like. Maybe you've learned it from one of my other courses. Maybe you've learned it from a pop song or a classical song that you're currently learning, and just try to add some seventh chords to various chords within that progression. Now, the reason I word it that way is because not every single chord is going to want to be a seventh chord. So try adding seventh to the first chord of a progression or the second chord. And what you'll find is that some of them stick. Maybe the first chord sounds great with a seventh, but the second one not so much. Third one not so much, fourth one sounds good. And as you're going through these progressions, you're going to see splashes of these sevenths working their way in. Essentially, you're reworking the progression to kind of make it a new at least the flavor of that progression is going to be a bit different. And this will always be available to you. As you're learning a new chord progression, if there's a song you really like, try adding some seventh and see if you can kind of make it your own. Now, there will be some PDFs provided within this course to help you learn the material not only in this video format, but from many different angles. Don't forget to practice these seventh chords so that you can truly absorb the material from within this course and then apply it in a real world situation. Now practicing these seventh chords is going to be very important. It's not just about learning the theory behind them, but getting those shapes at your fingertips so that you can then apply these within many different types of real world environments, whether that be performance, composition, or whatever musical avenue you're choosing to take. So I hope you're ready to learn about seventh chords, and have some fun, I'm going to catch you in the first class. 2. Class Project: Project is quite simple and meant to help you get the ball rolling with seventh chords. Take a song you've learned, preferably a simple pop song, take the chord progression and try adding seventh to one or two of the chords. You're going to notice right away that it changes the vibe of the progression, but I want you to try adding seventh to different chords within the progression until you feel that it improves the vibe. You're going to record yourself playing the original progression as well as the new one, and then you're going to supply either an audio or an audio and video submission through a public link, whether that be through YouTube, SoundCloud, video, I'll let you decide, but I need to be able to review the material so that I can give you feedback. Now, ultimately, there's no wrong answers with this. If you really like the second chord and the fourth chord with seventh, then go for it. Maybe the first and the third chords work really well. The idea is, I want you to make sure that you're listening to the before and after having added those sevenths. And I want you to either at the end of your video or audio submission or within the project description, you're going to explain what you like in terms of the improvement of the seventh chords. You're going to explain how you think the progression has changed for the better. And really, this is just to shine light on the fact sevenths do change the colorization. They do change the vibe, and I want you to be able to explain that verbally, again, either through your audio or video submission or through the project description. This is one of the more simple projects that I've had my students work through, but the idea is just to get the ball rolling. If you're used to basic major and minor chords, now we can get you playing some seventh chords, recording yourself playing them, and describing a little bit about how you feel about those chords within the progression. It's enough to get you started, and you can take things from there. I hope you have fun recording this project. Remember to do it on a day where you're really feeling in the zone. This is meant to be a fun process, so take your time with it, have some fun with it, and I'll catch you in the next class. 3. What is a 7th Chord: Let's start off with talking about what a seventh chord is. So what we want to do right off the bat is take a look at scales. And I'm hoping at this point you have some understanding of scales, but basically, it's a set of notes moving higher and lower as you're moving up and down, it's the same collection of notes, and we follow tones and semitones to create these scales, sometimes known as whole steps and half steps. So for major scales, we have tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. And for minor scales, we have a different set of tones and semitones to create those scales. Once we know our scales, whether they are major or minor, what we want to do is take the first note of that scale and go up by a skip. This is known as a skip or a third because we're going from the first note of the scale to the third note of the scale. From there, we can go up another skip to the fifth note, and here we go. One more skip brings us up to the seventh. So when we start on the first note of a major scale and go up a couple of skips, we end up getting a major seventh chord coming from the major scale. We will be talking in great detail about the major seventh chord in one of the classes to come, but that tends to be the first seventh chord that a lot of people learn. From there, we can take something like an A minor scale and do the same thing where we're playing the first, third, fifth, and seventh notes from that scale. In this case, a natural minor is the scale we are deriving these notes from, and it gives us a minor seventh chord. Again, there'll be a whole class on minor seventh chords, but just as a synopsis, to show you, we're taking a scale, we're moving up by skips until we have some type of seventh chord. Now, some seventh chords are not derived on the first node of a scale. For example, dominant sevenths are derived on the fifth node of a scale. And if that sounds a little bit confusing, again, there's a whole class that's going to be on dominant seventh chords, so I can properly explain all the ways of thinking about accessing those dominant seventh chords. So whether we're choosing to start on the first note or the fifth note or in the case of minor seven flat five chords, the seventh note of a major scale, we get all these different types of four note chords. We have a note. We have a skip, a skip, a skip. It gives us a four note chord, and we get plenty of different types of seventh chords from using this approach. So, you understand why we're calling it a seventh chord, right? We're accessing that seventh note from some type of scale. Now, that seventh that we're adding is going to color the chord. What's kind of interesting is that adding a seventh to a major chord doesn't necessarily make it sound more major. Sometimes color or tension can sort of juxtapose the initial chord. A major chord with a bit of this tension of the seventh almost takes on a bit more, I would dare to say a minor characteristic. It's still very much major, but it's challenged a little bit in terms of its major tonality. This is also true for minor chords. Very sad. But when we had the seventh, it cools it down a little bit. It smooths it out a little bit, so it's not quite so devastating and that classic sort of minor sound. So we access seventh as the seventh note of some sort of scale. The seventh is going to add some color and sometimes even challenge the tonality of the initial chord, whether it be major, turning to major seventh or minor, turning to minor seventh. Short, that's what a seventh chord is. We're going to go into great detail about all the main types of seventh chords that you're going to experience as a pianist of nearly any genre, these seventh chords pop up a lot, whether it be even in classical music, especially in romantic music and jazz. We'll find it in hip hop and electronic music as well, too. So let's follow up this class with our next class on when to use seventh Chords. I'll see you there. 4. When to Use 7th Chords: So when should we use seventh chords? In short, anytime a genre is very open to adding color, it's a great time to explore seventh on chords. When I say color, I'm talking about not just simple, happy and sad sounds, but adding a complex twist to that original emotion. Styles that come to mind would be jazz and other styles influenced by jazz, like R&B, soul hip hop, a lot of Latin music. Pop uses seventh chords quite a bit, but it depends on how elementary versus how colorful you want that pop track to be. Funk is also a very colorful genre, so it's going to use some sevenths. And even in electronic music, I find myself using sevenths quite a bit. Now, also, if you're a composer for cinema, this is a great way to tap into the complex emotions of a scene. Not everything is happy, not everything is sad. So major and minor eventually run their course. How do I create chords that sound like intrigue or dismay? Now we might want to start to access more colorful chords. While seventh might not always be the solution, it's sort of a way of opening up a door into playing more colorful chords. You can think of color in terms of taste sort of like spice. Right away, you're not going to appreciate every little bit of color that you can add to a chord. But over time, the bitterness or the spiciness is going to get a little bit more palatable. Ask yourself how you like this sound here? This is a G altered chord. If something like that is too intense, then you have to sort of work into it. But some people they love spice. They love bitterness. So color to the ear is a little bit more palatable from day one. Now, you don't have to use color or seventh on every single chord. If I'm playing a hip hop track and I want to add some seventh on some chords, that's okay, but it doesn't have to be on every single chord. So as you get learning these seventh chords, try experimenting with all of the chords having sevenths or just some. Do you like to start your progression with more color, or do you like to start it with a bit more stability and simplicity? Really, it's up to you as a composer and as a performer. Now some styles don't want sevenths as much as others. Heavy metal comes to mind, partially because there's so much distortion on the instrument that extra colors just end up sounding like more dissonance or more tension, and we don't really get to hear the color because of the way the distortion, especially on guitars, is operating. Now, this is even true for basic major and minor chords in metal because they're using so much distortion. Quite often, instead of playing a full chord, they'll end up just playing a fifth. So this D minor becomes something called D five, which allows the thickness of the distortion to fill out that middle area. Besides, if you put a lot of distortion on guitar or piano or whatever instrument and play a major or minor chord and then take the distortion off, you'll notice you can hear the major and minor quality much better with the distortion off. So when we add seventh or other colors, this principle is exaggerated even more. So some styles want to keep it simple, but play around a little bit more with tone. Again, metal comes to mind, and quite a few versions and genres of rock also come to. Now, eventually, all of this bleeds together. Prague rock takes a lot of influence from jazz, but you have to make sure that you're cognizant of what sort of instrument am I applying it to? What is the tone of that instrument? For example, is it Very distorted? And how can I delegate amongst a full band a colorful sound that works in that style? So again, another short answer of when to use seventh chords, listen to the style that you're trying to recreate. Whether you're learning it from sheet music or using your ears, you might end up hearing or seeing those sevenths on chords. And then you kind of know that this becomes an acceptable sound in that genre moving forward. But again, anything that derives from jazz is a really safe starting point. So make sure you're so make sure that you're listening for those jazzy characteristics to understand if sevenths might work well in the style you're trying to play. Alright, we've covered the basics of what seventh chords are and when to apply them. Let's jump into the first type of seventh chord. That's very common. It's the major seventh, we're going to cover in the next class. I'll see you there. 5. Major 7th Chords: Okay, so in our first class, I did briefly outline what a major seventh chord is, but I want to go into it in much more detail. To find a major seventh chord, step one is really to know a major scale. And from that scale, we're going to extract a seventh chord out of it, choosing the first, third, fifth, and seventh notes. Now, the easiest major scale to start with would be a C major scale on piano, it's all white keys. From C, we go up tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone or full step, full step, half step, pull, full, full half. And that gives us our C major scale. There, we can skip, skip, skip. So we're skipping every other note and playing the root or one, three, five and seven. This gives us a major seventh chord. Now, if I was to go through the C major scale and play all of the chords available that are seventh chords, we would end up getting actually two major seventh chords. One of them is built off of the root. So we would say this is a major seventh chord built off of the one. The next one after these minor seventh chords is our four chord built on the fourth note of the C major scale. We're given yet again another major seventh chord. So even just moving back and forth between those two chords is a great starting point to start to explore this major seventh sound. You could even try improvising a little melody. And if you want to, in your melody, play the seventh of whatever chord you're playing. So on C major seven, play B, and on F major seven, play E. And you'll notice it brings out more of the color of that chord. It's like you're shining a little spotlight on the fact that it's a seventh chord. So here is a C major seventh chord with a C. Very stable. Here's the E as a melody note. Quite happy and optimistic. Here's the G, kind of floats a little bit, and then here's the B. A little bit more colorful, a little bit more tense, but nothing too extreme. So if you really want to highlight the color of that chord, try incorporating it into your melody. Now, what's interesting is if we take this major chord and we add the seventh, let's now get rid of the bottom note. And what you'll notice is we have a minor chord. So the bottom three notes are major. That's our foundation. The top three notes are more of a minor sound like this E minor chord. So we're actually adding, in my opinion, a sprinkle of minor onto that major sound. This is why quite often when I'm doing ear tests with my students, major seventh chords get called minor seventh, and minor seventh chords get called major seventh. It's because they cut the difference a little bit in terms of tonality. The major chord is now a little more minor or the minor chord is now a little more major. We'll discuss that more when we go to the minor seventh chords, but the same thing basically is happening. Minor chord on the bottom, major chord on top, put it together. Now, if you don't know all your scales or you don't particularly love this scale approach to figuring out the notes of a major seventh chord, I have another trick for you, but you need to know your basic chords to start. So if you know all your major chords, for example, you play any major chord, and then you find from that bottom note, where is my octave above it. From there, you move down one semitone. Because after all, the seventh note of a major scale, the leading tone is what it is quite often called, is a semitone below your octave. So major chord, plus a semitone below the octave. What we would say is major chord plus major seventh. And I consider that to be the formula for a major seventh chord. We're going to use these little formulas as we go through, but try to keep in mind that a major seventh is always semitone below the octave. And to be clear, this term major seventh is overlapped right now. This chord is called a major seventh, but the distance from the bottom to the top note is also called a major seventh. So that's what I was just talking about this idea that a semitone below the octave is a major seventh. Then you fill in that major chord in between and you get your major seventh chord. Now in a minor key, we're also going to find some major seventh chords. For example, C major is all white keys, and the relative minor A natural minor is also all white keys. So the one and the four of C major is now becoming, if A is our one, in this case, 23. So C major seven is known as the flat three major seven. I'll talk about that in a second. Four, five, six, here's our flat six major seven. So when you're in a minor key, the third and the sixth notes of that minor key are going to provide you major seventh chords. Now, why am I calling this a flat three and this a flat six? We're all white keys. There's no actual black note, flats. It has to do with the fact that we kind of refer to harmony in reference mostly to a major scale, and then alter that as we dive into minor harmony. So if here is a a major scale, to make it a minor scale, I have to flatten the three, flatten the six, and flatten the seventh in the case of a natural minor scale. So any chords built off of the three, six or seven that have now been changed will be identified as flat three, flat six, and flat seven. So in major keys, you'll find major seventh chords on the one and four. In minor keys, you'll find it on the third note and the sixth note, but you would call it flat three and flat six. One other thing you can do is just move around major seventh chords almost randomly or even create a little bit of a melody. Let's say we have Mary Had a Little Lamb something very simple. Let's take that melody and make it the top note of seventh chords. So the first note E is the top note of an F major seventh chord. D is the top note of an E flat major seventh chord, and C is the top note of a D flat major seventh chord. Check this out. It would end up sounding kind of like this. It's pretty jazzy, it's pretty sampled sounding. What I like to do with this sort of thing is apply it to, like, a drum and bass drum beat or some other sort of EDM sort of housi beat because this idea that house and drum and bass producers back in the day or jungle producers would have taken old records and sampled one chord, for example, from an old soul or jazz record, brought that into their sampler and just re pitched it around. So they would take a C major seven from again, disco sol, whatever it is. And then you pitch that around, and you're only going to get major seventh chords at higher and lower pitches. So you end up getting sounds sort of like And it has this sort of iconic, classic house drum and bass, resampled sort of sound. So whether you're applying Major seventh chords within a major key or a minor key or just moving them around almost randomly, those are three great applications for Major seventh chords. You have an idea now that the seventh does not make it sound more major. In fact, to some extent, it challenges the tonality a little bit. So this class was all on major sevenths. The next class is on minor sevenths. I'll see you there. 6. Minor 7th Chords: So as lightly discussed in the last class, minor seventh chords are going to derive from minor scales. In this case, natural minor scales. And a natural minor scale, basically, if you know a major scale, and you start on the sixth note and go from that sixth note up to the sixth note using all the same notes from the major scale, you get a natural minor scale. It naturally comes out of the major scale. But another quick way to create a natural minor scale is take a major scale and just flatten three, six and seven. Sometimes flattening is white keys down to black keys. That's how we generally know flats. But in some cases like A major, for example, we have C sharp, F sharp, and G sharp as our third, sixth and seventh notes. To flatten them is now to take them down to white keys. So when I say flatten three, flatten six, and flatten seven, really what I'm talking about is just lowering those notes by one semitone. So let's take that A major scale. Latin, three, six and seven. And from this natural minor scale, we're going to play the root, third, fifth, and seventh. In other words, the first note of the scale, skip up, skip up, skip up. And that's how we get our seventh. But you'll notice this seventh is not a semitone below the octave. So A to A is our octave. Now we're down a tone or a whole step. And this interval of being one tone short of an octave is known as a minor seventh. So just like the major seventh chords, having the interval of a major seventh, and then we fill it in with a chord to make a major seventh chord, now we have the interval of a minor seventh and we fill it in with a minor chord to create a minor seventh chord. So here's our interval of a minor seventh, one tone short of an octave. On the bottom, we supply that minor chord, and now we have a minor seventh chord. But just like the major seventh chords, we're not adding a more minor sound necessarily by adding the seventh. If we take a look at what we have for this A minor seven, bottom three notes are A minor. Top three notes are actually C major. So, to some extent, we're challenging that tonality. Now, the bottom three notes dictate, in this case, the basic tonality. It is more minor than anything. It has a splash of major up top. And this is actually true if you keep adding more skips, you have minor and then a little less minor, a little more challenge, but then it brings back a bit more minor, but then it adds a bit more major, and it's just making it more complex. Now, I'm not saying it literally is more major, more minor and flipping back and forth, but it's adding all these different dimensions to the color of that sound based on these extra notes that you're adding. Now, in a minor key, you're going to find a minor seventh chord as the one chord and then again, as the four chord. And also for natural minor, you're going to find as your five chord as well, too. Now, quite often this five chord is changed. We'll talk about that later, but there are three minor seventh chords available, built off of in a minor scale, the first note, the fourth note, and the fifth note. Again, for now, if you want to play around with this sound, play around with the first chord and that fourth chord and just improvise a melody over top, maybe something like this. And like I mentioned before, if your melody is outlining the seventh of that chord, it's like you're putting a spotlight or sort of highlighting the color that you have within that chord. By playing an A in the melody, things feel stable. C, things feel a little more minor, arguably, but we'll say it does. This is the note after all that makes this a minor chord. E floats around a little bit more. That's our fifth, and then G being our seventh, really outlines that color. So in a minor key, it's our one, four and five chords. In a major key, we're going to find minor seventh chords on the two, three and six. So back to C major. Here's our one chord. It is a major seventh. Our two chord, as promised, is a minor seventh, D minus seven, D minor, with a tone below our octave, E minor seventh, E minor, with a tone below our octave, F major seven, G dominant seven will come to that soon. A minus seven, a minor with a tone below the octave, and B minus seven, flat five or B, half diminished seven. You can see that just by covering major seventh and minor sevens, we have two major sevens, three minus sevens. That's five out of the seven chords available. And as you can see, they are more common than the dominant seventh chord and the minor seven flat five. And that's why we started with those. You can get a lot of mileage, just adding sevenths to major and minor chords within pop songs and rock songs just to kind of see how you can change the flavor of a song a little bit. So as a starting point, major seventh and minor sevens are very important. Again, we can think out of context of a key, not that we are in a major key or a minor key, but this idea of resampling a chord. So let's say I took from an old disco record this chord stab and I move it around. Now I'd be moving around this minor seventh chord to another minor seventh chord. And this is even more iconic when it comes to UK garage or house music, drum and bass or jungle, anything that's doing a lot of resampling from older styles. So you get sounds sort of like. And the more complex you make those minor seventh chords, maybe adding ninth or something like that, you dial into that sound even more. This is a bit out of context, but just to show you Put a drum and bass beat behind that, and you end up getting something that sounds pretty authentic. So that's it for minor seventh chords. Don't forget to check the PDF that's going to outline all these chord shapes for you. I hope you had fun in this class, understanding minor seventh chords a little bit more. We're taking it from this angle of how do they come from scales? And what is the formula? In this case, minor chord plus a minor seventh, one tone below the octave. So you have a few different frames of thought in terms of thinking about these minor seventh chords. Now it's your job to start applying them. I'll catch you in the next class where we're going to talk about dominant seventh chords. I'll see you there. 7. Dominant 7th Chords: Next up, we're going to talk about dominant seventh chords. Dominant seventh chords are not major seven, they're not minor seven. They're kind of a hybrid between the two. To give you a quick synopsis, a dominant seventh chord is a major chord with a tone below the octave, so a flat seven or what we've been calling a minor seven. Major chord, minor seven, put it together, you get a dominant seventh chord. Now, straight out the gate, I should mention that this chord is never used more than it is in the blues, where you're going to get dominant chords all over the place. It's one of those things where the blues is built off of that sound. Now, the blues is one of the only styles where the dominant chord can sound resolved. We finish on the sound of a dominant seventh chord because every chord was a dominant seventh. At the end, it's not this jarring thing to have a dominant seventh chord. But in most other style, dominant seventh represents tension. Part of the reason for this is that unless you're playing jazz and a very specific type of scale called the Mixolydian mode, for the most part, a dominant seventh is going to want to resolve somewhere else. It's going to want to resolve to the one chord. Let me give you an example. In C major, we talked about how the one chord is C major seven. The two is minor seven, the three is minor seven, the four is major seven, and our five is dominant seven. Now, because we have a major chord with a flat seven or a minor seventh, this doesn't come from traditional major or minor scales. As I mentioned, it might come from the mixolydian mode within jazz, which is a major scale with a flattened seventh note. But even then, generally, jazz musicians are not thinking of the dominant sound as a settled or finalized sound. So I know it's a little bit more abstract that we're not thinking of this seventh chord as our one chord, but rather, generally, we're going to think of it as a five chord. So in C major, our fifth chord is that dominant seventh. There's no dominant seventh on the sixth or seventh scale degrees only on the fifth. So this five chord, this dominant seven, wants to take us to a one chord. Now, that one chord can be major, but it can also be minor. Remember in the minor seventh class, I mentioned that the one, the four, and the five are minor seven, but quite often the five will challenge that. Well, we're actually going to play the five chord as a dominant seventh. You can choose either, but the dominant seventh will come up more often. Now, this chord is being taken from the harmonic minor scale. Harmonic minor relating to harmony, we are changing the scale to accommodate a different chord or some different harmony. In other words, a harmonic minor, which has a G sharp. Now when I go to the fifth note and I go up a skip, up a skip, up a skip, I get a dominant seventh chord. Now, plenty of music has used just the one and the five in both major and minor environments. Check this out a little bit of Bethoven ode to joy as a reference. 15, dominant, seven, one, one, five, dominant seven, one, five, one, five, one. Five, five, five. One, five, one, five, one. The whole song is just like ones and fives. One, five, one, it was all over the place in classical music. And this is why generally in classical harmony, you start with understanding a one chord moving to a diminished chord or to a dominant chord. With my students, I start them with the dominant chord, usually. So as we can see there, the function is not to be resolved. It is to create tension. After all, if I go, And then I just walk away, you can feel that tension, right? Now it's resolved, it's back to the one chord. So dominant sevens, again, major chord plus a minor seventh is the formula, major chord tone below the octave. They represent the fifth chord within a key, and they want to fall like gravity down to the one chord. They're used quite frequently in things called modulations, and I do have a whole course on modulations. It's outside the context of this class, but it is, I think, a very important function of the dominant seventh chord, and it's a big enough topic that I did create a whole course out so if you're interested to learn a lot more about dominant seventh and generally modulations, feel free to check out that course, as well. Now, there is one other function for the dominant seventh chord that's not mentioned as frequently, which is that it can resolve up a tone. It's a much softer sort of resolution, and it plays into something called the deceptive cadence. So if I'm in C major, here's my one chord. Here's G dominant, here's my five. And instead of going back to one C major, I'm going to pull up a tone. To a minor, the relative minor. This is a great way to sort of sneakily deceive the audience or the listener hence deceptive cadence because we're not going down a large amount, we're going up a small amount. We're not resolving to the expected major chord, we're resolving to a minor chord. And generally, again, we're not falling down. We're going up. Everything about the expectation of the dominant seventh chord is sort of rug pulled because instead of down to a major as a large leap, we're moving up to a minor as a step. So again, to be clear, the deceptive cadence is one, five, six, and quite often the five dominant. Now, things don't settle on that A minor. They still want to find their way back to C in the case of this example. But you can see, it's not a terrible sound. We have one, five, dominant, and then pulling up to that minor sound. Now, if I was in A minor and A was my one chord, one other cool thing that you can try is this soft pull from G back to A. I mean, 90s dance music to this sort of this sort of sound here. But we can also consider once we go from one to something like four, I can pull up through a few chords a flat six, flat seven dominant, and then back up. So, in other words, whatever your one chord is, just move down a couple of chords and pull your way up. Now, in that case, I use the major G, but we're going to Making a dominant seventh, and it pulls its way back up. So all that is to say, sometimes dominant chords will resolve up a tone, and usually that will be to minor. You can do this to major chords as well, too. It has sort of like a Mioesqe sort of sound, but it's not used nearly as much. Now, before we also talked about how the major seventh chord adds a bit of a minor sound when we have that seventh, and a minor seventh chord adds a bit of a major sound when we add that seventh for a dominant chord. We're actually adding something called a diminished sound up above. I'm going to cover that a couple classes from now, we're going to talk about the diminished seventh, its functions, how it's built. But I did want to mention now that the diminished chord generally is quite tense. So we're taking a major chord and adding tension. A good reason why this wants to resolve somewhere else is because of that sneaky, hidden diminished sound. Now, at the end of the day, it's still more major than it is diminished because the foundation of the chord is major. But just keep that in mind, the diminished sound is sort of poking its way in there a little bit. So that's it on dominant seventh chords. In the next class, we're going to talk about minor seven flat five chords. I'll see you there. 8. Minor 7 Flat 5 Chords: O the minor seven flat five chord, the sound of the romantic era post classical. We hear this sound a lot in romantic music by composers like List, Chopin, debuts, the list goes on. We also hear the sound quite a bit in jazz within what we call a minor 251 progression, which I'll cover in a moment. And we're going to talk about how this chord is formed and how we can extract it from scales. Let's dive in. So first of all, the minor seven flat five is exactly what it sounds like. If ACEG is a minor seventh chord, we're going to take the fifth, so we have root third, fifth, seventh. We're going to take that fifth and just flatten it, lower it down one semitone. Sometimes white to black, like in this case, it could also be black to white or even white to white in the case of F down to E or C down to B. This is another chord that is not meant to be resolved upon. You don't finish a song generally on a chord like this. So how does it function? Well, first of all, in a major key, if I move through all the different chords, the seventh chord is our minor seven flat five. To some extent, it pulls up to the one chord, but not as convincingly as other chords like diminished seventh chords, which we'll cover later. So, in my opinion, the minor seven flat five has less of a place in major music, and it's found a bit more within minor music. Now, let's start with talking about the jazz application and then wind back to the romantic music application where they do a little bit more with it. So we talked about how this would be a seventh chord in a major key. If we're thinking A minor, now this cord would be found on the second scale degree, and it's not found in other places. In major, it's found on the seventh, in minor, it's found on the second. That's it, just one instance per scale. So we have this, which is functioning as a two chord. A is our one in A minor. So this B minor seven flat five is functioning as our two in A minor. Now, I should also briefly mention as a side note, this is often called a half diminished seventh chord. Part of the reason is because the bottom three notes treat a diminished chord, which is up three semitones, up three semitones, but then it's up four semitones. So instead of having a fully diminished seventh chord, seventh is not actually a diminished seventh. It's a minor seventh, one tone below the octave. Diminished chord, minor seven, they call it half diminished seven, which is a little circle with a slash through it. Think of the degrees sine with a diagonal slash. So back to this function within jazz, we talked about how this chord would be our two chord. Now, in jazz, one of the main chord progressions is 251, and we're going to be covering that in detail in one of the classes to come, but we're going to get a little bit of foreshadowing within this class. So two is our minor seven flat five. Five chord, as we discussed in the last class, will be a dominant seven built off the fifth note of your key, and then resolving down to a minor seventh as your one chord. Remember, this is a 251 of a minor key, meaning the one, the thing we resolve to is a minor sound. Two, minor seven flat five, five, dominant seven, one minus seven. So this minor seven flat five chord often functions as a two chord, prepping a 251 chord progression. One fun thing I like to do is take a minor seventh chord, play around for a while within whatever key that might be. So we're playing around in a minor. And at some point you just straight up turn this minor seven chord. To a minor seven flat five. Now it's functioning as a two. So from here, A is the two of G minor in this case, so we do a two, five, one of G minor. Again, this is getting deep into modulations. But what I'm showing you is that on the spot, you can take a minor seven, turn it to a minor seven flat five, and that will take your ear. You just have to understand how to make that modulation work. Now, I should mention that in jazz, there's a particular type of minor scale called Locrian, where we have a natural minor scale like A minor, but the second note and the fifth note are flattened. And if we take this sound, and go up by skips, we end up getting the minor seven flat five. So like in the last class with dominant seventh chords, we're not thinking of the Mixolydian mode, a major scale with a flat seven or the Locrian mode, a natural minor scale with a flat two and a flat five. We're not thinking of those as home base. These are just scales that you would use to improvise over top of these chords. We should be thinking of dominant seventh chords as wanting to lead us somewhere unless it's the blues, where everything can be dominant and it sounds fine. And the same with these minor seven flat five chords, we're understanding that they want to take us somewhere. Now there's a bit more of an extension of they act as a two or which take us to a five, which take us to a one, a bit of a longer way to get back to the one, but it's such an iconic sound and it works really well. So to discuss the formula of this chord, we have a diminished chord, which is a note plus three semitones, plus three semitones. But the seventh is a minor seventh. It's a tone belower octave, which means the bottom three notes give us a diminished sound, and the top three notes give us a minor sound. So it takes the tense spookiness and adds a little bit of cool minor sound up top. To me, this chord can feel quite pricey and expensive. Depending on how you use it, it can be very elegant. Now, I talked about how we would discuss how this functions in romantic music. It's a very big topic. I have a whole course on romantic harmony, but I'll give you the basics. If we take this chord, this minor seven flat five, you can see the bottom note is the two of A minus. So again, A is my home base. So this is a fancy two chord, like I've explained so far. If I now put this chord in first inversion, look at this, we get a minor six chord. Something a little bit different has a very different sound than the regular minor sound, but this acts as a four chord. So you can see D is on the bottom now. So we can do something like using discord as a four a five, two, and one. If I go up one more inversion, again, I'm just taking the bottom note up in octave, keeping all the same notes. We're doing that again, D up and octave. I get a fancy version of the one, two, three, four, five, flat six. You can think of it as a six, but again, technically, we should call it flat six. Flat six, five. One. So listen to those three chord progressions back to back. The 251, the four, five, one, and this fancy 651. Check it out. Here's the two. Five, one, sign with the four. D minus six. E dominant. It's A minor now with that fancy six chord. Just listen to that last, the fancy six chord. Listen to this. I love that sound. And again, each of these takes us to a five, which takes us back to one. So there's a bunch of ways of thinking about the minor seven flat five. It's most often used as a two chord within a 251 chord progression. You can experiment outside of that, but for now, I would say start with that. I hope you enjoyed that class, and I'll catch you in the next one where we're going to talk about minor major seven chords. I'll see you there. 9. Minor Major 7th Chords: This next class is going to be our shortest within this course because this chord doesn't come up quite as much. It doesn't have quite as many functions, but it is worth mentioning because up to this point, we've talked about major seventh chords, which is a major chord with a semitone below the octave. We've talked about a dominant seventh chord, which is a major chord with a tone below the octave. We talked about a minor seventh chord, which is a minor chord with a tone below the octave, but we haven't talked about the fourth combination of a minor chord with a semitone below the octave. This is a minor chord with a major seventh, and it's called minor major seven. The name isn't too fancy, it's pretty on the nose, but you can hear it is a very tense chord. This is what I call the soap opera chord, where back in the day when we would have soap opera on daytime television, these really dramatic daytime series, and someone would say something like, It was me that ran over your brother. And there'd be this really tense chord, and they would transition into the next scene, which surely would just be more tension. Now, the minor major seven chord comes from the harmonic minor scale. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, three, five, seven. There it is. Minor chord with a major seven. But if you're in C harmonic minor, like in this example, it doesn't mean you would finish on this minor major seven. Quite honestly, you'd probably just ditch the seven and finish on a minor sound. Where you might see it is something like a minor chord with an octave. The octave goes down a semitone, now we have a minor major seven chord. It goes down a semitone, again, now we have a minor seventh chord, and it does something from there. So that would sound something like this. Again, you could take it wherever you want from there, but it would generally be a sort of passing chord. So this chord works really well in cinema all on its own, like some tense strings in a horror film or a thriller, just to create a bit of a tense atmosphere. You can also try and pop music as a passing chord, as I had shown you. But ultimately, there's not a ton of use cases for this chord. I wanted to make sure that you knew it because out of the four combinations of major chord with both types of sevens and minor chords, with both types of sevens, you only knew minor with a minor seventh. So now you know minor with a major seven. Again, unimaginatively called the minor major seven Cord. So that's it on the minor major seven chord. I'd recommend experimenting around with it a little bit, but don't make it your main focus. You're going to get more use out of the other chords mentioned within this course. Again, this class was just meant to help fill out your knowledge so that there isn't one cord combination that you felt I left untouched. That's it for this class. Next up, we're going to talk about the diminished seventh chord. It's much more complex. There's a lot more use cases for it, and I'll catch you in that class. 10. Diminished 7th Chords: Et's get talking about the diminished seventh chord. If I was to go through a major scale, what you'll notice is that our seventh note supplies this diminished sound. No other note does. We get major, minor, minor major, major, minor, diminished on our seventh note. Now, if I'm in A minor where A minor is the one, then our two chord is this diminished chord. So as a starting point, we want to know where we can find our diminished chords and then from there, build them into diminished seventh chords. Now, you might have noticed I've mentioned in previous classes that diminished chords are basically minor thirds. We're moving up three semitones and then another three semitones. If we do this again, now we have a diminished seventh chord. Now, part of the reason it's called a diminished seventh chord is because this distance from the bottom note to the top is a diminished seventh. It looks a lot like a major sixth, but it functions differently. Allow me to show you, for example, a diminished seventh chord, starting on C. It's a little bit easier to see here. C to A, in our C major scale, that's our sixth note. So usually we would call this a major sixth. Consider this. C to C is an octave, C to B is a major seventh. C to B flat is a minor seventh, but double flats exist. So C to B double flat is a diminished seventh. We've taken the minor seventh, and we've lowered it one additional semitone. So what's kind of cool about this is you can still skip letters, for example, C, skip D to E flat. Skip F to G flat, skip A to B double flat. You're still skipping letters, but you're going to get quite often a combination of sharps and flats. That's not for every diminished chord, but quite a few of them will do that. So in a major key, we learn that this seventh chord, the diminished wants to pull up to the one cord tension resolution. The dominant seventh, the five that we talked about earlier, dropping down to one, this, to me, feels like gravity. The apple's up in the tree, it becomes loose and it falls down to the ground. The diminished cord is more like a needle sitting beside a magnet. It starts vibrating. It just sort of connects over to that magnet. It's a very close tension resolution. Now, same thing if I put a seventh on this, the diminished seventh, it just adds a bit more tension to this cord. And then resolves very similarly. Now, in a diminished seventh chord, the bottom three notes are a diminished chord and the top three notes are a diminished chord. This is the first time we're just adding the same flavor to the original sound. We're not making a minor chord sound a little more major or a major chord sound a little more minor. We're making a diminished chord sound even more diminished. Now, you might have noticed in this example of B diminished seven resolving to C major, have this note here, which is not from my C major scale. So if I'm in my C major scale and I'm using this chord here, I'm cheating a little bit because I'm pulling a note that is not inside the C major scale. Where we're accessing this note is actually from the A harmonic minor scale. Remember, I said the two chord of a minor scale is diminished. Well, now I can add that extra note up top that we were missing from our major scale. Now, technically, a harmonic major scale does exist. It's really rare. You're not going to find it very often in the wild. So what I like to do is consider that this diminished seventh chord is available, for example, in C major, because we're borrowing it from A harmonic minor, the relative minor scale. C major is the brother and A minor is the sister. They are relatives, and they're just sharing like siblings often do, and in this case, sharing notes. So yes, this B diminished seven can take us to C major. If I'm in A minor and I go down a semitone, remember A harmonic minor, we had this G sharp. There's also a diminished seventh chord available, a semitone below by minor, one chord. So for now, you want to think of diminished seven pulls up a semitone to either minor or major. Now, because diminished chords invert into other diminished chords, there's some kind of fun things that we can pull out of that. What I'm talking about is if I have B diminished seven and I now put the B on top, we could say this is B diminished seven in first inversion, right? We've taken the original position and inverted it. In other words, we've taken the bottom note up an octave. But really, this is also D diminished seven. If I invert it again, we could say it's B diminished seven, second inversion or D diminished seven, first inversion. But ultimately, it's F diminished seven. We go up one more time, we get G sharp diminished seven. So because G sharp diminished seven is B diminished seven, is D and F diminished seven, you can use any of these chords interchangeably. In other words, if I'm an A minor, G sharp diminished seven, we said pulls up a semitone. But B diminished seven can also pull us back to A or D diminished seven can also pull us back to A, or F diminished seven can also pull us back to A. So these are great chord substitutes for progressions like 251, 451, and 651. Check this out. If we have A minor as our one chord, D minor is usually our four chord, but I can play a D diminished seven to replace it or even play the minor first and then change it to diminished and then finish the progression. If it sounds like this, I'll give you both examples. A minors are one, D diminished is our four, E dominate is our five, and then back to one. Without me talking, it sounds like this. But like I mentioned, we can also change it from the original four chord, D minor into the diminished sound. Check it out. So that was A minor, D minor, D diminished, E dominant, and back to A minor. So I remember when I was a kid, I was learning Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven, and he would take chords that were major or minor and just change them on the spot, maybe changing a minor into a diminished or a minor into a major. And I always thought, How can you get away with that? Well, it really has to do with the overall context of harmony and understanding how there are generally multiple options available at one time. But also understanding how modulations work, again, that's outside of the context of this course, but quite often, Beethoven, that's what he would be doing. So the idea of taking a D minor, just changing it to D diminished, why am I able to do that? Well, we're thinking of it as a four chord or another option as a four chord. We also talked about how the two chord minor seven flat five, when we start to invert it and reorder the notes, now I have a minor six chord available. That tells me when I'm in a minor key, I can play a minor four chord. A minor four chord with a six or a diminished seventh chord, there's lots of different options. So that's why I really like diminished chords. There's so many use cases for them. If harmony is the body of a song, then diminished chords are the veins and the nerves that run in between everything else. As a good example, let's go through a C major scale. And on all the black notes, the notes that are not in the scale, we're going to play a diminished seventh chord before pulling up to the next chord. You'll see it kind of works pretty organically. We get C major, C sharp diminished seven to D minor. D sharp diminished seven to E minor. Next, we have F major just beside F sharp diminished seven to G major, to Sharp diminished seven to A minor. And then there's no B flat. So what we end up getting is a B flat diminished seven into a B diminished seven, prolonged tension, and then back to C. The exercise would sound like this. I resolve minor or major, it's really up to you. So as you can see, this tense Halloweeni sort of chord has a lot of different uses. Now, I mentioned that it is built off the seventh scale degree of the harmonic minor scale. But there are also diminished scales. And this is where diminished harmony gets very complex and outside of the context of this course, but I'm going to show you the basics. If you take any note and move up a semitone, and then a tone, and then a semitone and then a tone, and then a semitone tone, semitone, and back up to your octave, you get something called an octatonic scale, where there's eight different notes, octa being eight. In this case, we can also call them diminished scales. And since we went up a half step and then a whole step or a semitone, and then a tone, we can call this the half hole. Diminished scale. If I skip a note, skip a note, skip a note, you'll see we get a diminished seventh chord, there's actually lots of diminished seventh chords baked into this particular scale. In fact, every one of those notes, you can play as a diminished seventh chord if you just skip notes within that scale. This is also true if we go up a whole step and then a half step over and over. So in other words, starting on a note and going up whole step, half step or tone, semitone, tone, semitone, tone, semitone, tone, semitone. Now we have a whole, half diminished scale, and the same thing applies. If I start skipping notes, I find that I have a diminished chord, and again, moving up through each node of that scale, going to find that you pull out tons of diminished seventh chords. Now, unless you're trying to sound like a neoclassical orchestrator or someone that's, like, late romantic or 21st century, like, let's say, Mahler or Holst, their compositions were very influential towards composers like John Williams. So if you're hoping to take film scoring to a very high level, I'd recommend checking out octatonic harmony, understanding what chords are available within it, and how it can twist and turn what we are used to within conventional harmony. The whole reason I showed you that last part was not to confuse you, just to show you that you can technically pull these out of a scale fancy scales, they're octatonic, the half whole, and the whole half diminished scales. I will soon be doing a full course on diminished harmony. So if that's something that interests you, make sure you watch out for it. So we've talked about how these chords can function as wanting to pull op semitone to major or minor chords. We've talked about how they can be great chord substitutes. We've talked about how they're built and how they sound. For now, that covers the basics of diminished seventh chords. In our next class, we're going to be talking about major 251 chord progressions and minor 251 chord progressions. This next class is going to cover major seventh, minor seventh, dominant seventh, and minor seven flat five chords within progressions to show you how we can start to put this all together. It's a little more jazz focused, but at the same time, it's a very zoomed out view of how you can start to apply these chords with one another. So let's get talking about how these chords work within progressions, and I'll see you in the next class. 11. Major/Minor ii-V-I: The 251 chord progression, both in major and in minor keys, in this class, we're going to cover it. Now, we've already talked a little bit about minor 251 chord progressions, because in order to explain a minor seven flat five chord, this is the progression that it most relates to, so they kind of went hand in hand. But now we're going to take a step back, start back with major, and then bring ourselves back to that minor 251 to give more context. Now, part of the reason why a 251 chord progression is so prevalent in jazz is that there's a lot of improvisation in jazz, and we want to be able to tap into many different types of colors, moods and emotions. A 251 chord progression in a major key uses three different types of seventh chords. And of course, you can color those chords however you want, but in their most basic colored form, we're working with seventh chords. If we go back to good old C major as our example key, it's pretty simple, since we're on all white keys to simply start on the second note of the scale. This gives us D minor seven, the fifth node of the scale. This gives us G dominant seven, and then the first note of the scale. This gives us C major seven. So we have a minor seven, a dominant seven, and a major seven chord. Already, we have lots of tricks that we can apply to these three different colors. Now, Harmony quite often likes to move by fourths and fifths. We've talked about five chords leading us to a one chord and dropping a fifth. But if you think about it, the two drops a fifth to the five drops a fifth to the one, which is why sometimes you'll see this progression extended to a six, two, five, one, or even 362, five. One in jazz. Those are generally known as turnarounds, but that's a little bit more of an elaboration on the basic 251 progression. Now, the 251 progression can use different inversions. It can use rootless voicings, spread voicings, tons of different types of applications for how you choose to play the harmony within that progression. But really what I'm hoping to show you within this class is that you can use these seventh chords either exclusively or you can choose to eliminate the seventh on some chords. But in this case, you'll see a seventh works on all three of these chords very well, and we're able to apply the three main types of sevenths we talked minor seven, dominant seven, and major seven chords. Now, whether you're adding a bass line to something like this and accompanying a singer or saxophone player, whoever it might be, but you could also improvise over this chord progression, again, work with a minor sound, the more tense, dominant sound using some fancy scales, and, of course, the major sound, as well, too. And it's just really fun to be able to twist and turn and weave in between all these different types of emotions and colors that are available from these three chords. As a quick tip, I would say, instead of leaping around through these chords, you can play the two in root position to get started. Play the five chord in second inversion, which means you're just dropping the top two notes. So you have to do a bit of research. Ask yourself, what is the first chord, D minor seven, in this case, DF aC. Second chord is G dominant seven, GBD F. There's that DF again. So we'll keep the DF on bottom, and we needed. G and B from that second chord. So we drop the top two notes to the G and B, and then the C major seven is back root position. In other words, it's root position, second inversion, root position. This is going to allow you to not have to leap so much so as you're soloing, your left hand can kind of feel out those chord shapes a little bit better. Now, one thing you'll notice with that progression is the sevenths become the third of the next chord. In D minor seven, C is our seven. And if we use this second inversion, the seven of D minor has become the third of G dominant. Then going back to a root position C chord, you'll notice this F is the seventh of G dominant seven. It's going to fall to the third of C major. For the D chord, we have a C as a seventh which falls to the third of G. That's a B in this case. And then from this Gchord F, the seventh falls to the third of C. You might want to relisten to that last part a few times. I know it's a bit of a mouthful talking a lot about thirds and sevenths. But if you want to learn about shell voicings and general voice leading between chords, especially in a 251 progression, you're going to want to make sure you have a thorough understanding of how those notes, the thirds and sevenths like to move. But, quite honestly, for now, you can break the rules and just play all reposition chords. No one's going to call the piano cops. It's totally fine. So that's the major 251. We're working with a minor seventh, a dominant seventh, and a major seventh chord. For a minor 251, we're still going to have a minor seventh chord. That's our one chord. We're still going to have a dominant seventh chord. That's our five. And notice that major and minor 25 ones, the five is always dominant. That's pretty important. But the two chord in a minor 251 is going to be a minor seven flat five. Allow me to explain. If we're in a minor, A minus seven is our one chord, and that's where we're going to finish this progression. Our two chord is the B minus seven flat five. Our five is E dominant seven. But again, this E dominant seven with a B and a D in it has two notes in common with the two chord. B and D are also in B minor seven flat five. So again, root position, second inversion, root position gives a very good result for this minor sounding 251. Now, again, I wanted to explain that in these 25 ones, because we're using three different types of chord, Jazz musicians will quite often tap into many different colorizations to play over those chords. That is way out of context of this class. I'm not going to explain altered modes and Locrian sharp two and other fancy scales to get improvising over this. There are other classes for that. For example, jazz piano improv tricks one and two, which are other courses I've created. Feel free to check if you're interested in soloing over these progressions. Now, this minor 251 is also seen quite a bit in romantic music, and it's funny how we can start to see overlaps of older styles like romantic lead into newer styles like jazz music, and then have other musicians, modern pop musicians take these applications into more digital music genres. So what I'm trying to say is, if you think this is only for jazz players, that's not necessarily the case. It's a great way to get started with something called predominant chord progressions. We know we want to finish on our one, and we know a five will take us there quite well. But can we sneak another cord before the five chord? And in this case, the two chord was our predominant. It came before the five chord. But you can also experiment with four and six as two other great cords that lead you into a predominant progression. In other words, 451 and 651. So what I'm really telling you within this class is practice all the different types of seventh chords that I've given you up to this point because they're all going to find their way into different progressions in different ways. But you'll want to make sure that you have them handy and readily available so you can bust them out as needed. Now, don't forget to check the PDF that has all the basic root positions for all these different cords. If you're taking private lessons, I would also recommend trying inverting, arpeggiating, and doing some other fancy things with these basic shapes. But for now, learn the basics. You don't want to skip over memorizing all of these shapes as much as you. So that's it for the class on major and minor 251 Progressions. I'd recommend starting with those and then experimenting with other predominant progressions. Also, use this knowledge as a way to be able to identify where you're seeing similar progressions in other songs that you're learning. I hope you enjoyed this class, and I'll catch you in the next class where we're going to wrap things up. 12. Wrap-up: So if I was a master chef and I taught you how to make the best pizza dough possible and the best pizza sauce possible and select the best cheese, that's how you came to me. You came to me already knowing how to do a basic pizza. Those are your major cords and your minor chords. This class was really about teaching you how to start to add toppings. In other words, add color to the cords that you're working with. And in this case, specifically seventh. Same way, you'd be able to identify a Hawaiian pizza versus a meat lover's pizza versus a vegetarian pizza. Eventually, you'll be able to hear these chords so that as you're listening to a song, you'll be able to identify them and learn that song even quicker. If you're a songwriter, you also might be able to tap into knowing when you want to color chords a certain way. But keep in mind in this class, because we're only talking about seventh, it's sort of like in the pizza analogy. I've added pepperoni. Oh, pineapple, let's say, and maybe two vegetables, a couple of basic seventh chords. But as you learn more and more about sus chords, adding nines, 11, thirteens, et cetera, that's when all the toppings really become available. Now, I do have a course all on coloring cords. It talks about many different ways that you can color chords, but I think that having a full course just on seventh is really important, especially for beginners because seventh at least for me and for a lot of other pianists, that's where we tend to start in terms of coloring chords. Whether you want to jazzify a cover song you're working on or have more of a harmonic palette of a song that you're writing, you now have seventh chords readily available to you. Some of them are jazzy, some of them are innately more classical sounding. But you can see seventh chords have a wide variety of sounds and a wide variety of stylistic application. They are ultimately a great way to re harmonize basic progressions and add a bit of color to your music productions. So as I briefly mentioned, it doesn't stop at seventh. There are ninth, 11th, and 13th and variations of those what we call opera extensions. If you did enjoy this idea of coloring cords, do make sure that you start to look into all of those other upper extensions as they all offer something a little bit different in terms of coloring those basic major and minor chords. I hope this course has given you some fuel to add some color to your cords and get practicing some new shapes. I just want to say thank you for your attention during these classes, and I'll catch you in the next class our Outro. 13. Outro: Thank you for taking this course. That is all about seventh chords. By now, you might not want to hear the word seventh for a little bit, because we've gone through in such great detail that you can use this course as a reference, whether you want to remind yourself how major seventh chords are formed or how a minor seventh chord functions, there's going to be plenty of material within this course that you can refer back to. I highly recommend that you come back to this material and continue to practice it until it starts to feel second nature. Now, early in this course, there was a class that outlined all of the project details for this course. I want to remind you to go back to that class so that you can get all the information you need to submit your course project. As always, make sure you're taking this material into your private lessons so that your teacher can help you understand it better, apply it to some of the material that you're working on, and also just generally give you their own perspective on seventh chords. I truly hope that this course has helped you feel more confident in your harmonic exploration on the piano. It doesn't stop at seventh. There's lots of ways that we can color chords, sus chords, ninth, 11th, thirteenths, inversions. There's all these different things that we can do to change the way harmony feels. But when we first start learning, it can be very overwhelming. So my hope to you is that these seventh chords can give you a solid foundation for understanding that coloring chords is not only an option, also understanding how these seventh chords sound on their own. So feel free to sift through the courses that I've created, see if any others resonate with you and then slowly improve those building blocks that'll help you stand out as a musician. One last time, I want to thank you for taking this course and congratulate you on finishing it. I hope you had a great time. Don't forget to check out some of the other courses that I have available, and I'll catch you in the next course.