Chord & Harmony Mastery for Guitarists

1. Course Introduction: Hi, I'm Jamie Ellis, and welcome to my course on chord in harmony Mastery for guitars. I'm a professional guitar player, and in that time, I've toured across the globe, played with named artists, and working with some of the country's best studios. Now, in this course, we're going to start right at the beginning. We're going to talk about all of your basic open chords and what the difference between major and minor is. We're then going to take that further. We're going to open up sus chords, augmented chords, diminished chords, and then go further again into sevenths extensions, altered harmony, and even how we can re harmonize our chord progressions to sound really, really professional. Now, our aim here is to not only help you understand harmony on the guitar. I'll also give you some professional techniques to help you stand out from every other guitar player. I'll break everything down into a nice and easy to follow step by step guide so I can guide you along your journey. Don't worry if you get stuck. You can always go back and rewatch some of the videos until you master these exercises. I've also included diagrams and supporting resources to really guide you through this journey. So grab your guitar, maybe a pen and a notepad, and let's dive into Lesson one. 2. Understanding Chord Diagrams: Going to move on to learning chords, but before we do so, we first need to understand what chord is. A chord is simply one or more note played at the same time. That's one note on its own. It's not a chord. It's great for melodies, but not so much for adding extra harmony and reinforcement in a sop. I'm going to build on that by adding some extra notes. And I have more than one note playing at the same time, giving us our chord. Now, in this course, we've got some basic chord diagrams to help you learn your nine essential chords. To read these diagrams, it's like you've taken your guitar and stood it upright, just like so. At the top of your diagram, you've got a thick black line, and that represents the nut of the guitar right here. And you've then got six vertical lines representing your strings. On your right hand side, you've got the lower Etring moving over to the far left where you've got your high Etring. Now on these diagrams, we've placed colored dots which indicate where your fingers need to go. So for example, on an A major chord, we've got an X on this first string, the low E string because we're not playing that string, and we've got a dot right here up on the nut to indicate an open string. We've then got two dots on the D string and the G string at fret two, and another dot on the B string at fret one. We've then got a final dot up on the nut again of the high E string indicating an open string. Now, we've also color coded these to indicate what notes are involved in the cord, but don't worry about that yet. We'll come to that in a later video. 3. Major Chords: Look at some easy chords to get you guys playing some songs. Now, before I start, there are two main types of chords. We've got major chords, and we've got minor chords. Major chords have a happy sound. They're really light, they're really airy. They sound quite cheery. Whereas your minor chords sound really sad. Now, we're going to start learning some of these, but first let me give you a little example. Here's a major chord. Here, it's got a nice happy sound to it. Let me give you a few. They sound quite positive. Here's a few minor chords. They have a darker sound to them. The sounds sad. Let's compare the two it's right next each other a major and a minor. Here's the major. And here's the minor. Here the difference. Really important skill to be able to recognize the difference between major and minor. So as you play in these chords, listen out and try and work them out for yourself, as well. Now, let's start with a nice easy chord. We'll start with the A major chord. Remember, major means happy. We're going to use these first three fingers, our index finger, our middle finger, and our ring finger. Now starting on the D string. That's his third string here. Take our first finger and place that in fret two. Mm that know there. We're then go to take our middle finger, and that's going to go directly underneath on the G string at fret two. And finally, you're going to take your ring finger, and that's going to go on fret two of the B string. So you're going to get these three fingers here in a nice line. When playing chords, make sure you're right upon those fingertips because we have a few other strings here that we don't want to mute with our fingers. We want those to ring out sound quite nice. If I line my fingers flat like, so gonna get that sort of sound. We're not going to get the full chord. So nice up on your fingertips. My wrists below the neck there, and my thumb is nice and flat on the back to give me something nice and firm to grip against. Now we're going to start this A chord strumming from the A string, this second string here. We're going to strum through all five of those strings. L so. I'd recommend once you've got your finger in playing the chord like that, like so. And in picking through the individual strings. Just to check all the notes are ringing out. If you've got any slight buzzing, adjust your fingers accordingly so you can get the proper note. Once you've done that, I'd always recommend taking your fingers off and give them a little shake shake them out. You've lost the shape. Forget about the shape. It's gone. Shake your hands out, and we'll approach the shape again just to try and, you know, get our heads and our fingers used to play in these shapes. This is really alien for new players, and it's gonna take a little while for you guys to work out how your fingers are going to work, how to work with the guitar. So we're gonna try that again, all three fingers. We've got fret the D string, G string, and B string. And there's an A major chord. Moving on. Let's take a look at the D major chord. Take your first finger, and that's gonna go on fret two of that G string right there. We're then go to take our middle finger, and we're gonna skip a string. We're gonna come all the way down to this high E string here. And that's also gonna go on fret two. So we've got fret two with the G and fret two with the E. Finally, take your ring finger, and that's going to go right there in fret three of the B string. It's going to fill that gap. Like, so I'm going to strum from the D string. Just give us that nice D major cord right there. Moving on to an E major chord. One of my favorites. Gonna use all six strings. Start with your middle finger, and that's gonna go on fret two of the A string. Next take your ring finger and place that on fret two of the D string just underneath. And then with your first finger, you're going to place that on fret one of the G string right there. Remember to keep your thumb on the back. Like so. So you've got a nice grip and keep all of your fingers right up on their fingertips so you're not touching any of the other strings. They give all six strings a good strum. H. Let's give you that nice E major cord. Moving on, the C major cord. This one's a little bit of a stretch. So bear with me. Start with your ring finger and place that on fret three of that A string. We're then go to take our middle finger and place that on fret two of the D string. And your first finger is going to go on fret one of that B string. Now, this one's really important to keep those fingers up on your fingertips because we've got that open G string there, and we don't want any of our fingers muting the string. So nice up on your fingertips, thumb and good placement on the back, wrist slightly underneath the neck, and you gonna strum again from the A string. It's a C major cord. G major next. Another big stretch, but a great siding cord. Start with your middle finger and place that on the low E string at fret three. Your first finger is then going to go on fret two of our A string. And finally, your ring finger is going to stretch all the way to that high E string there on fret three. Really important with this cord, again, like the C major cord to keep your fingers nice enough on their fingertips, so we're not muting any of those middle strings. So the final cord we're going to address, so you've got your nine essential beginner cords is the F major chord. It's a little bit like the C major chord. So let's start with that first. With my C major chord, I'm simply going to move my ring and my middle finger down one string. So you've instead got your ring finger on fret three of the D and your middle finger on fret two of the G. That gives you this nice shape here with all three fingers in a line. If you want for an extra little challenge, you could lie this first finger flat to play both the first fret of the E and the B string there. But don't worry if you can't quite make that yet, you can just fret that B string on its own. There's your F major chord. 4. Minor Chords: Some basic major chords. We'll next move on to a few minor chords, just to get you guys started in some songs. Starting now with some minor chords, we'll take a look at the A minor chord. The A minor chord is a little bit like that E major chord we learned earlier. It's the same shape. So let's start there. Let's start with that E major chord. Just as a quick reminder, I've got my middle finger on the A, ring finger on the two of the D, and first finger on one of the G. Now once we've got that shape, move everything down one string. So our middle finger is now on the D. O ring fingers on the G, and our first finger is on the B string at fret one. Same shapes different string. And we're going to strum that from the A string. It's that A minor chord. The major. Here's the minor. Practice going between the two. You'll hear the sound between the major and the minor. We've got A major and into A minor. Next, let's get the D minor chord. Start with that middle finger. Place that on fret two of the G string. Your ring finger on fret three of the B and first fingers going to go on fret one of the E string, just like so. And like the D major chord, strum from that D string. Once again, let's go back and forth between the major and the minor. So D major and D minor. The final minor chord we're going to look at today is the E minor chord. Really easy. Going to take your middle finger, place on fret two of the A string, and your ring finger goes on fret two of the D string. Now, this time, unlike the E major chord, where we had our first finger on fret one of the G, we're not going to use that. We're going to leave it as an open ringing G string. We're just going to use those two fingers there. So here's the major and here's the minor. 5. How To Practice Chords: I've said, these chords are fundamental to getting you started on guitar. They're great place to start learning chords, and we're going to use these shapes later to unlock the rest of the fretboard. Practice these chords slowly, get them under your fingertips and try and memorize them as they're really, really important. Practice going between the major and the minor, as we've done. And also practice transitioning between those chords. Let's do C to G to D. Like so. Come up with different combinations, write down as many as you can think of, and just try playing between different chords. It's those transitions are going to be key to playing at speed in songs. Just go back and forth between the two until you're comfortable. Once you've done that, move on to the next lesson. 6. Transitioning Between Chords: Something I see a lot of new students struggle with is transitioning between chords, when trying to play these strumming patterns. And the reason for this is because students believe they need to take their fingers off of every string when transitioning between chord. So, for example, if I'm playing a decord and I transition to a G chord, quite frequently, I'll see this. So much wasted time between the cords not necessary. However, it's really important to know that some of these open cords share similar notes. So we can actually transition between some of these cords without removing all of our fingers. If we take a look at an A minor cord and we transition to a C, we notice that our first finger on the B string doesn't need to move. It stays on that first fret. Now, keeping fingers in place when transitioning between cords is a great way of speeding up cord transitions. That, for example, is much faster than that. And it's gonna help add some uniformity to your playing. Spend some time with your beginner chords and see if you can find which chords share the same notes. Once you've found those cords, practice transitioning between them so you can learn the muscle memory of keeping fingers in the same place. Much faster than taking your hand off between each cord. 7. Understanding Bar Chords: Now going to move on to bar chords. Now this is something that beginner guitar players really struggle with it requires a lot of strength out of your fingers, but it is something that's going to take your plane to the next level and begin unlocking this fretboard. Bar chords require all four fingers and a lot of strength in your thumb. You will find that as you play bar chords further up the neck, you're going to require less pressure because you're further from this nut. So I'm going to start playing bar chords up here to make it easier for you guys, and we can slowly work it down to a harder barcord down here. Now, we've got two shapes for our major and our minor chords. We're going to start on the E string with a major barchord and we're going to start it right here at the fifth fret. It's called a bar chord because we're going to bar all six strings with our first finger. When I say bar, I mean, we're going to place our first finger across all six strings pressing down. Try this on your own without adding any extra fingers, just so you can feel the grip needed between your thumb and your forefinger. You want each note to ring out nice and clearly. This can be hard. Don't worry if you can't get it first time. Take your time with it and build up the strength in your hands. Once you've got this bar, we'll then add our extra fingers. We're going to start with our ring finger. Now we're going to place our ring finger on fret seven here of the A string, and our pinky finger is going to go directly underneath it at fret seven on the D. We're then go to take our middle finger and place that there on fret six of the G string, and that's going to give us our major barchord. To make this bar cord minor, all we have to do is take that middle finger off. Students often find minor bar cords a little bit harder than major because of that G string. I often see students raising their first finger in a slight arc when trying a bar. It's really important to get a nice flat line across those six strings to ensure each string is placed down. Properly. There's our major and you take off the middle finger for your minor. Moving on to the A string, we've also got two different major and minor shapes. We're going to start by barring from the fifth fret again, but only this time on the A string. Now for the major shape, we're going to use all three fingers, and it's going to resemble an A major chord that we started play down here before. So let's have our bar. We're going to place our middle finger on fret seven of the D, ring finger on fret seven of the G, and pinky finger on fret seven of the B. See, I muted that e string now accidently. It's really important to check each string as you pick through the cord just to make sure none of your fingers are blocking any other strings. Quite a hard shape this one, and it does put a little bit of strain on the wrist. So like I said before, take your time with it and build up. Some placements really, really important here, making sure that you're pushing from this muscle here, not from your wrist. And if I turn, you can see how my thumb sits on the back like so. So there's your major shape. We're now going to play a minor shape, and our minor shape looks a little bit like the major shape on the E string. So start again with that bar on the fifth fret. And we're gonna take our ring finger and our pinky and we're gonna put them on fret seven of the D string and the G string. Then go to add our middle finger onto the B string at fret six. And there's your minor barchord. Here's the major. And here's the minor. So to recap, we've got both a major and a minor barcord shape on both the E string and the A string. Here's the major on the E, and here's the minor on the E. The major on the A and the minor on the A. Try moving these shapes around the fretboard, allowing you to play different chords. One thing to mention with this major Barkle shape on the A string is I often use my ring finger to just bar these three strings right here. Personally find it a little bit easier, and it frees up my other fingers to our cord embellishments, which I'll touch on later. Give it a go, see if you can get it under your fingers, but not to worry, there's nothing wrong with using these three fingers right here. 8. Understanding Chord Construction: So let's understand how we sort of construct chords. Now, I've got a C major scale written out here and I've got my scale degrees written just below. Now, a chord in its simplest form is called a triad. It's built up of three notes. Now, if I was to go back to my major scale, I could turn any one of these scale degrees into a triad by simply choosing one notes. Let's take D. You take D, and then you skip one, and you say F, and you skip one, you take A. So it's always play one, miss one, play one, miss one. So if I want a C major triad, I can go C, I can go E, and I can go G. Now, we've obviously got major and minor chords. Remembering that major is a happy sound and minor is a sad sound. So from the major scale, if I want my C triad, I would take notes one, skip one, note three, skip one, note four. So that would give me C, E and G. So let's write that here, C, E and G. And as we've said, that's notes one, notes three, and note five from major scale. That three, that major third is what defines whether a chord is major or minor. Let's now turn this into a minor triad. So we've got C, E and G one, three, five again. Here's my major triad. To make it a minor triad, you have to flatten the third. So a minor triad would be C. We flatten the third, that becomes E flat, and then we've got G. So let's do that. That's E flat. Flat three. Lovely. So there's our major triad, and there's our minor triad. So let's take a look at the theory behind the construction of a seventh chord. We already understand that 135 is a major triad and one flat 35 is a minor triad. What we can do is we can add additional notes on top of this to create seventh chords. So to make a C major seven chord, we simply have our 135, C, E and G, and then we continue stacking on top of each other in that sort of process. The next one would be B. So a major seven chord, C major seven chord would be CEG and B. And that's our seven, one, three, five, seven. So for a minor seven construction, we've got our one flat three, five, and then using the same pattern we did here, we'll take the seven. But because it's minor, we want a flat seven. So we've got one, three, five, flat seven, which in this case would be B flat. And that would be our C minus seven chord. Now, we've also got a dominant chord. Let's take a look at that. Our dominant chord would be C, E, because it's a major third, G. And for that dominant sound, we want a flat seven. So we'd add a B flat. So one, three, five, flat, seven. You can see obviously how each cord has got its own sort of characteristics. You've got the major third and the major seven, and a major seventh, the minus seven cord, you've got a minor third and a minus seventh. And in the dominant cord, you've got a major third. And a minus seventh interval. Now, our final one is a minus seven flat five. I'm sure you can work this out already. Minus seven. But flat five, minus seven, flat five. So let's take this. We've got a minus seven chord, C, E flat, G, B flat, minus seven, flat five, so we have to flatten the fifth. So there will be our construction of a minus seven, flat five chord, one, flat three, flat five, flat seven. Now, harmony doesn't stop at just seventh chords. We can add extensions such as ninth, 11th, and 13th so adds an extra color to our harmony. What do those ninth, 11th, and 13th actually mean? Well, as we already know, our scale only has eight notes. But if we were to continue counting past the octave, we continue increasing our numbers. So we go eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, for example, right? And this sort of letter sequence would just continue. So eight is C, nine would be D, ten would be E, 11 would be F, for example, basically just a ninth is basically the second, 11th is basically the fourth, and a 13th is basically the sixth. But because they're an octave height in the city, we're continuing to build on top of ourselves in that sort of extension structure. That's why we sort of call them ninth, 11th and 13th. So we've got our major seventh chord here. Let's add a ninth, which would technically be a second, so it would be a D. If we were to add an 11th, that would be our fourth, which would be an F. And then if we were to add a 13th, that would be a A. So that there would be the full construction of a major 13th chord. We have one, three, five, seven, nine, 11, 13. Now, on guitar, especially because we have a limited amount of fingers, we don't always play all of these notes. The fifth is the first to be removed because it doesn't actually add any sort of specific characteristic to a chord. We can also then sometimes remove an 11th if we've got a 13th or we can remove a ninth if we want an 11th. Because sometimes between these intervals, we create tritons, which are a little bit clashy. As long as you've got your fundamentals, your first, your third, and your seventh, which would dictate whether it's a major, minor or dominant, you can then extend further with one of these optional ninth, 11th or 13th. So let's take a look at how we'd take this major 13th chord, and we could turn it into a minor 13th chord, for example. First of all, we'd flatten a third to make it a minor chord. We'd then also have to flatten the seventh and make it a minus seventh. And all we do is add our upper extensions. So that'll be C, E flat, B flat, and then we could add our upper extensions as we please. 9. Triads and Inversions: A chord in its basic construction consists of notes one, three, and five from the major scale. And when you play those three notes together, we get a triad, which is a chord in its most basic form, right? So I've got my major triad here, one, three, five. And then to make it minor, I lower my third degree by one semitone one flat 35. So those triads in their basic form can also be inverted. Basically, we can take that 135 combination and put them in different orders to give us slightly different sounds, and then we can use those inversions for voice leading. So that's all a G major triad. Here I've got G, B and D with G in the base, and that would be a root inversion. But I can take it to a first inversion. Well, I've got B in the base, the third. So I've got third, the fifth, and the root. Root inversion, one, three, five, first inversion, three, five, one? Other can then second inverter. We've got the fifth in the base. Five, one, three. So those will be our inversions. Building off of these E sort of shaped cords using our cage system. We can also find triads from our A shaped cords, and we'll do that in C. So here's my C chord Aha cage system. And my triads right here. I've got one, three, five C E and G root inversion. I can then put it into first inversion where I put the third in the base. No, it's sit there. We've got E, G and C. That's also the upper structure of our root inversion triad. So there would be a C triad there from our E shape. But the upper structure of that it's also kind of an inversion. You just change the base note. And then we can put it in our second inversion, which would be there. And if you notice, if you looked at the cage system video, that would also be our D shape. So you're starting to see how all of these shapes are starting to intertwine and you're starting to really understand how this wrap board works. Now, using those different inversions, I can play C in loads of different places all over the fretboard. I've got here, I've got here, I've got here, here, here, there, and loads of other places. We're starting to unlock and understand the fretboard and able to play these chords in different positions, making chord progression sound more stylistically, perhaps, if we're doing let's say a funk tune, I wouldn't play a funct tune here. It's too clunky and the chord's too big, but I would play that C chord up here. And then I can use those inversions to add some variation into my comp. Mm hmm. Give it a go. 10. The CAGED System: The cage system is another great way of unlocking the fretboard, so we can visualize shapes that we've already learned elsewhere on the neck. Now we're going to jump back real quick to our beginner cords, specifically C, A, G, E and D. It's also known as the cage system. Now, as it states in the name, caged CA GED utilizes those easy beginner shapes. And we're already familiar with both E and A from our barcords. If I take our E shape and I now play a G barchord, you can see this E shape right here, and our first finger acts as that nut. With the root note being on the E string. Like if we take our A open chord and turn that into a barchord we have the A shape right there with our root note being on the A string. Next, we can take our D shape. We can move that around the fretboard. Now let's look at the C cord. Now, this one's a little awkward to translate it elsewhere along the neck. Now, if I play an e cord in the shape of a C, it's a little awkward. So we're not often going to use this shape, but it's great for visualizing cord patterns and chord tones. Now, this shape would mainly be used with a capo replacing my first finger. So again, the cage system's great for understanding how we can use the capo to change between different keys. Same goes for our G chord. If I play a B chord in the shape of a G, That's incredibly awkward, but again, we can use it to find great red tones. This finger would usually replace with a capo. A great way of unlocking the fretboard using this cage system is to take chord progressions you already know and translate them into other chord shapes. So let's take our already used C, A minor, F, and G cord progression, and place that in different places around the neck using the cage system. We'll try this using the caged order, starting with C. We already know this progression in these shapes. So if I take a C cord in an A shape, you can see here that I can take this A shape and slide it back. As I want an A shape. I can do that with other chords, too. D shape. And our E shape. Now, a great way of unlocking the fretboard is to use this cage system to find cords all over the neck. Let's take, for example, an A major cord. We have it there in an A shape, but let's also find it in the other shapes using that cage system. There's our E shape. We know this one from our bar cords. There's an A cord in a D shape with our root note being right here. There's a C shape, our root note being right here. And there's the G shape. So as you can see, you can take these well known shapes and move them around the fretboard give you different chords just by changing the root note. The next step is to learn the notes on the fretboard so you can use these cage shapes to play chords across the neck. 11. Major 7th Chords: We understand a basic triad using one, three, and five from the major scale. We can add additional notes onto that to add some color to our chords. So we're going to take a look at seven chords. Now obviously, we've got major and minor chords, so we can turn those into major seven and minor seven. I'm going to introduce the dominant chord, and that would come from the fifth degree of our major scale. And that's used a lot in blues music, but we'll come a little bit more to that later. I'm also going to look at three different variations of the same chord. We're going to learn it from the E string. We're going to learn it from the A string, and we're going to learn it from the D string. We've also got inversions which we can touch on later. And again, it's all just basically to understand the fretboard, unlocking different voices, fingerings, inversions and variations, allowing us to play chords in a more stylistic manner, or freely move at the fretboard. Let's start by taking a look at a major seven voice in from the E string. You're gonna start by taking your first finger and place it on fret three. We're then go to take our ring finger, and that's going to go on fret four of the D string. So we've got a root note, and this note here is going to give us our seventh. We're gonna go one, three, five, seven from the major scale. So I've got my one. I've got my seven. My pinky is going to play the third degree, and that's going to sit on fret four of the G string. And then my middle finger is gonna grab the fifth degree, which is on the third fret of the B string. That's really important with this voice in to mute that a string. That sort of muddies the tone up. So I use my first finger to slightly touch on that a string just to mute it. And there's our G major seven chord. Now let's take a look at G major seven chord from the A string. We're going to start that up here at fret ten. There's our G, our root note, and we're going to add our ring finger to fret 12 of the D, and there's our fifth. That gives us our fifth chord that we're already aware of. We're then gonna add the major seventh, which is our middle finger on fret 11 of the G. And in our pinky, grabs our third quartet. And that goes at fret 12 on the B string. Here, our seventh chords have got almost jazzy sort of sound to them. They sound quite pretty, quite sort of Oh, you know, compare that to a normal G chord. It's a bit nicer. It's a bit fancier. It's gonna add a little bit more color and spice to your chord progressions. So we've got a Gj of seven here. We've got a Gj of seven here. On the D string, you can play here. And basically, all of these shapes are building off our cage system. So that D major seven is going to start with a root note here on the D string at fret five. And then we're going to bar with our ring finger all across fret seven of the G, the B, and the E. You could use all three fingers. I personally would like to bar it gives my other finger some freedom for a little bit of extra coloration. B that. So we've got G major seven. G major seven and G major seven. Practice those, and then we'll look at some version later. 12. Minor 7th Chords: Moving on to minus seven chords. We're gonna do exactly the same as the major seven. We're gonna look at the E shape, A shape, and the D shape. We're gonna keep it in G so you can compare the sounds. So our G minus seven chord and the E string is like so. We're going to bar with our first finger at fret three, and then we're going to add our ring finger to fret five of the A string. We've got a root note. Our fifth, our flat seven is here on the D, our minus third, our fifth, and then our root note again. And that's quite a bulky chord, so you can't simplify it just a bar at fret three, which is what I do most of the time, to be quite honest. Okay, moving on to the A string, shape. Looks like so. So, again, we're going to borrow at our first finger. We're gonna bar at fret ten. We're gonna take our ring finger, and that's gonna go at fret 12 of the D. That gives us our root in our fifth. Our minor seventh is right there on the G string. That's fret ten. And our middle finger is gonna play the minor third, and that's gonna be a fret 11 on the B. Our fifth is just on that last string. So our D minus seven shape. Looks like so. So I'm going to take my first finger for our root note, and I'm gonna place it right there, fret five on the D string. I'm gonna take my middle and ring fingers, and they're gonna go at fret six on the B and the E string. And I'm going to use my pinky to grab my fifth degree right there at fret seven. 13. Dominant 7th Chords: Dominant chords are a new chord. We've not yet touched on in the course. Now they're used a lot in blues music, and they've got a lot of tension to them. As we sort of progress into more advanced stuff, we're going to use more sort of tension and release, and that's where a lot of pros really maximize on advanced scales, advanced harmony and all that to really create that tension resolution. It's what music is all about. It's all about. Where's it going? Where's it going? Where's it going? There it is. It adds a little bit of spice to the music, right? So there will be a dominant chord. It's from the fifth degree of the scale. So in the key of G, you're gonna be a D seven. I'm gonna play a G seven here just 'cause we've used that G for our major and our minor seven chords. That would naturally want to resolve to a C. But we'll look at a little bit more of a theory of that in another video. For a dominant seven chord, really easy, all you want you to do is play a normal G bar chord. So. An just take your pinky finger off. That's gonna give us that minus seven there from that bar right there. On the A string, I want you to play the G major seven shape that we learned earlier and take your middle finger off. Yeah, really hear that tension in there. That tension comes from a tritone, basically between the third degree and the flat seventh degree. And a tritones like a real jarring sort of sound. You can hear it there. It always, always wants to resolve. Like that. You can hear the pull. And that's resolved. So on the D string, my dominant seven chord looks like that. We're gonna place our first fingers always on the G. The fret five. Our ring finger is gonna get our fifth degree here at fret seven. Our middle finger is going to play fret six of the B string. And in our pinky finger is gonna grab fret seven of the high E. That triton in there again. So we've got a dominant here, predominant here, and a dominant here. 14. Minor7b5 Chords: Now, as well as major seven minus seven dominant seven chords, we've also got a minus seven flat five chord. That's kind of like a half diminished chord. So voice that on the E string. We're going to voice it like so. So it's got obviously root minus third and minus seven, and we've got a flat five. It's kind of what it says in the ten minus seven, flat five. A bit like an altarchord if you've seen that video already. So give me a voice in for a minus seven chord G minus seven right there. I go to take that fifth degree, and we're going to lower that down by one semitone. So I've got my first finger on fret two of the B. My ring finger and pinky finger are going to go on fret three of the D and the G, and my middle finger is going to stretch up to get my root note there on the E string. Minus seven, flat five or half diminished. On the A string. It looks like so. So we've got a root note here at fret three. We've got my flat five here at fret four, the D. I've got my flat seven on the third fret of the G string, and then I've got my minor third on my pinky finger there. Now, if you've looked at the diminished chords, diminished chords are just one note away from a half diminished. And all you have to do to get a diminished chord, a four diminishedchord, is double flat the seven. We've already got a flat seven here on our minus seven, flat five. It's already a flat seven. We double flat it. 15. 9th Chords: Expand it on our basic major and minor chords to create seventh. But we can expand those further and add extra extensions. We can add ninth, 11th, and 13th. Now, what does that mean? If we take our major scale, we usually count 1-8. But if we go above that in the octave, we take two octaves. We go 12, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight is one, again, right? It's the octave. And then note two will become nine. Note three will become ten, four would be 11, and so on. So anything above an eight, so nine, 11 and 13 is just an added extension, an octave higher than the root, if that makes sense. So let me explain. We've got a normal seven chord. I take a C major seven. Turn that into a C major nine. So within that core con structurally, we'll have one major third, fifth, major seventh, and also a ninth, which is technically to the second degree, but an octave above that root note. So a major nine Looks like so. Now, I'll get into sort of playing those shapes and things in a second, but before I do, we've only got four fingers. So at some point, we're going to run out of fingers to be able to play all of these notes. So this is where you start omitting notes, you start removing them from your cord shapes so you can get the upper structures in. Now, the fifth in a cord is usually the first to go, although it's one of those essential chord tones of a triad, it has the least impact on the tonality of the cord. The root tells us what the cord is. The third tells us whether it's major or minor. The seventh dictates whether it's dominant or minor still. In the ninth adds all this color, the fifth doesn't really add much difference until you get into altar chords, which we'll talk about later. So sometimes we will remove the fifth from these shapes. Now, let's take a look at nine cords. We'll start with major nine. And we'll start on the A string because for me personally, I just find there as an easier finger than some of the E string shapes. So it's play a major nine in C. We're gonna take our middle finger, place it on fret three of the Atring and we're then going to take our first finger, and that's going to go on fret two of the D string. That'll be our third. We've got a root in our third. We're then going to use our pinky finger to grab fret four of the G string, and that there will be our major seventh interval. And then my ring finger is going to grab fret three of the B string, and that's our ninth or our second. Next, we've removed the fifth from the voice in because it's not really necessary. So to make that a dominant chord, all we have to do is flatten. That's seven, one, major third, five, flat seven, nine. So that voicing would become this. So I've got exactly the same finger in pretty much, and I've just moved my last two fingers around. So I've got fret three, fret two, fret three, and fret three. Be a dominant nine. Now we've got a dominant nine. We can make it minor because a minor construction would be one, minor third, five, flat seven. We've already got the flat seven from our dominant, and then we have the nine on top. So here's our dominant chord. We just need to lower the third. There's our third. We'll lower that down. Our minor nine chord. Now, this is where understanding the fret board and understanding your scale degrees in your chord shapes is really important because as we get into upper structures, we want to start alternating things. You know, we want to start raising lower in thirds. We want to raise and lower sevenths. So being able to recognize, Oh, this fingers the seventh, this fingers the third just speeds that process up. And it also helps with improv when you want to hit this quartons. Now let's take a look at those ninth chords from the E string. Now, our major nine looks It looks like the same shape from our A string. We're gonna start with our middle finger and place that on fret three of the E. We're gonna do this in G, by the way. And then we're going to take our ring finger pinky finger, sorry, and place that on fret four of the D string. That gives us our major seventh. We've got our root, our major seventh. We're then go to take our first finger, and we're going to place that on fret two of the G string as nine. And then my ring finger is going to go on fret three of the B string. Is my fifth. Like with some other chords we've looked at, we don't want that A string, so you want to try and mute it with that middle finger. And there will be a major nine chord. Now, you'll notice with this voice in that we don't actually have a third, so it could be a little bit ambiguous as to whether it's major or minor. So we could also voice it this way to make it nice and clear. Now you'll notice that's basically our G major seven shape there. I've just re fingered it. So my pinky fingers available to grab the ninth degree right there. There will be a major seven. Let's stay with this because we've got a third in the cord. And we'll turn it into a dominant cord. Now dominant cord, we need one major third, five, flat seven and nine. So we need to flat on our seven. Now, our seven is on this finger here, so I made a finger. We're gonna lower that. Let's give that sort of shape. So I've got on the D string, I've got fret three. I've got fret four of the G, fret three of the B, and fret five of the height E. And we can also just simplify that shape slightly by changing our fingering like so. So I've just gone from there to there. My pinkie. Whatever's comfortable for you. Now, to make that a minor nine, we just need to flatten a third, which's my middle finger here. I've already got a bar here, so I'll just take that off. It looks like so. So, as you can see there, I've gone from this shape here, which had no third to just slightly revoicing it. So I've got a major nine, dominant nine. We can play it that way. And a minor nine. 16. 11th And 13th Chords: Okay, so we've looked at nines. Now let's extend that further to 11. Now, 11, like we talked about previously, is over the octave of eight. So 11 would be four. We're going to add a fourth to our voice in. And in all honesty, I don't personally use 11th chords that often. I use a minor 11th. I love a minor 11th sound. And it's always that chord that if you're in a chord progression and you swap a minor chord out for a minor 11th, it's always the chord that makes everyone go, Wow. So you might want to learn this one. We'll take a look at this one. I'll put some extra little voices down below, but I thought this chord was especially worth mentioning. We can do it an A minor 11. Love the chord. And we're going to start with a minus seven, just so we sort of can see a reference point, right? So here would be A minus seven quarter. Our 11th would be there. It'd be a D. Could place it here with my pinky finger on for seven of the G string. But by doing that, I've created more of a sus chord, I've lost the third, right? So we've created more of a four chord rather than a minor 11 chord. We've still want that third in there. So instead, we're gonna voice it this way. I've got my middle finger up on fret five, the E. We've muted that A string again. And then I've got my pinky my ring finger and my pinky finger here on fret five, as well, the D and the G. So I've got root, I've got flat seven, and I've got minor third. And then my 11th is coming from my first finger down here on fret three. So I just compare that to a normal A minor chord. And now we play the minor 11. It's got a little bit of spice to it. It's like, Oh, hello. It's been nice. And, of course, like with all these shapes you can move them around on the fretboard. Let's take a look at 13th. 13th are great. They're really great on dominant chords, because they ad that extra little bit attention. 13th, obviously, the sixth degree. Really, really nice. Really great on dominant chords. We do major 13th and minor 13th. I commonly see them as a professional sort out on shows on dominant chords and altar chords, as well. So let's start with that dominant chord. Here's our G, dominant seven. And the 13th would be the sixth. So let's work out where that would be. Let's count through the major scar. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13. There it is there in our chord. Such a pinky finger right there onto the fret five of the B string. That would be your dominant 13 chord. So now we know where our 13th is, let's just play the minor and the major seven chords, and just add the 13. It be a G major nine. Get the M. Bruno in there, xa. Or I could voice it like this. And my minor 13th chord? LexaOr I could get my. Use your thumb. It's a bit of a stretch. So I'll probably just buy that. I've got my written note just there. On the A string, let's do the same with the C, dominant chord to start off with. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That one, two, three, four, five, six. There it is there on that E string. So dominant chord? We've run out fingers. So let's try revoicing that. We could play that. That's quite ugly. That's quite uncomfortable. We can instead try a little bar there, or we could revoice it like so. There's no hard set rule on which fingers you're going to use as you get into upper structures and altar chords. There's obviously sort of the common ones everybody uses. But you'll find what works for you, 'cause it's your choice. It becomes a sort of a freedom of expression of which notes you omit, which notes you keep, which order you put the notes in. And that's why it's really important to have that fretboard knowledge. So you can go, I'm going to add a 13th to this. I'm going to add it here instead of here. Oh, I'm going to add a nine here, but get rid of the five, et cetera. So you could do a dominant chord, Lzo. And that would be technically a C dominant 13. Just make it minor. Like so. We flattened our third. Or I could do a major. Like so. So it's a little bit, actually, like a dominant nine shape there, only from the D string. C nine. C 13. 17. Altered Chords: Now we understand how to add upper extensions to our chords. We can also alter the chords. Now, this is mainly going to be seen in jazz music. They're a little bit out there these chords, so stay with me. They definitely take a while to get used to, you know, with some of these outside sounds, they're a little bit jarring at first, but you need to sort of familiarize yourself with the sound. And the more you do that, the more you'll be able to hear the best where they can be best applied. And some of that goes with some of the scales as well that we're going to talk about later on. So to alter a chord, we're either going to change the fifth degree or commonly the ninth degree. And we can also do this with the 13th and 11. But when you start altering the 13th, 13th to six. So if you flatten a 13th, it's going to become just a sharp five. So you get into sort of similar territory with just the same different titles. So we're going to focus on the fifth and ninth. Now, we alter a chord by either raising or lowering these degrees. So we've got a sharp five or a flat five, and then we've got a sharp nine or a flat nine. Now, if you're already familiar with where your chord tones are within your chord shapes, this is going to be really, really easy. Take a dominant chord because they're mainly sort of seen on that. You can sort of occur on minor chords as well, but I think dominant would be most prevalent I've seen. So if we take a Gant seven chord, let's alter it. Let's make it a G seven sharp five, right? So I want my first, my root note. I've got my seven. I've got my third. Now my fifth would usually be right here at fret three. That be like a, a dominant chord. Look so. I want to raise that fifth, make it a sharp five. Sort voice it looks so. I've got three of the A three of the E string, sorry. Three of the D, four of the G, and four of the B. You can hear the tension in that, right? That wants to resolve like a dominant chord to that C. But that extra extension that alteration to the chord just adds that extra tension. And that's gonna open us up to add some wacky scales over that and really sort of go outside of conventional harmony to add as much tension as possible to the release back to the root. So there's a sharp five. I'm sure you've probably already worked out how to make it a G seven flat five. I'm just going to re voice it. Like so. So I've taken my fifth and I've just lowered it down MFra. Same goes for ninth, our ninth is usually up here. So if I take a dominant nine chord, I want to sharpen the nine, I just raise my pinky finger. And I want to flatten the nine. So. Now, you can also add fifths to this, so we can have a sharp five sharp nine or a flat five, sharp nine, flat five, flat nine. There's all these different combinations, right? So let's just try that. I've got a G seven sharp five sharp nine. G seven sharp five flat nine. G seven flat five sharp nine. G seven flat five, flat nine. You can see the fingers get a little bit awkward there. But you can see the finger ends get a little bit awkward there, but, you know, just sort of take your time with them. Your fingers will sort of slowly move into shapes. There's some very peculiar shapes. You don't always have to hit those notes. We talked about before the fifth can be admitted. You could just have the flat nine. It becomes optional, and no one's gonna call you out on a gig, especially when you hit this level. No one's gonna go, Oh, I'm sorry, you're fired. You missed your flat five at that G seven flat five sharp nine. No one's gonna do that cause no one's gonna know. You're not going to hear it. Just adds extra spice. That's all it's for it. Extra decoration. So that's it from those E shapes. Let's take a look at the A shapes. So I've got my C seven. And we want a C seven flat five. Let's lower my fifth. Or C seven sharp five. Let's third 'cause my fifth will be here on the G. For a ninth chord, let's sharpen and flatten the nine. Got a C nine, my nine pinky finger. So let's do a C seven sharp nine. Raise it. There's that chord there. And that's also actually nicknamed the Hendrick chord, the dominant seven sharp nine. The Hendrick use all the time. So you might be familiar with that voice already. I've also then got flat nine. So I'm just gonna bar that second fret there to give him my flat five, just so. Now, our fifth would usually be on the E string right here. So I could also add my E string. I could do a flat five flat nine. Or I could do a sharp nine sharp five. I just borrow them with that pinky finger. The combinations are not endless, but, you know, there's a fair few that you can work out here. So spend a little bit of time altering your chords, and then we'll talk a little bit about theory with the whiteboard and how to improvise with them in some other videos. All the chord shapes are down below in case you get stuck. 18. Understanding Altered Chords: Now understand how we can extend chords. Let's take a little look behind the theory of altering chords. Now, to alter a chord, we only play with the fifth or the ninth degree. Right here, I've got a C dominant seventh chord, and I want to alter it so we can either raise or lower the fifth or we can raise and lower the ninth. So this could become, and I'm going to write them down below all the different alterations we could possibly have. So I've got a dominant seven there. I could also have let's put it over here. We could have C, E. Let's do a flat five. We can have G flat. We can have our dominant seven B flat. And then we could have a nine, which would be D, or I could do a C, E. We could do a raised fifth. That'd be G sharp, flat seven, B flat. And then I could raise all over the ninth. I could add a sharp nine, which would be a D sharp, or I could do a flat nine, which would be a D flat. So you've got sort of 44 variations of how to alter chords. Sharp five, flat, five, sharp nine, flat nine. And you can combine those two as well in sort of different alterations. 19. Augmented And Diminished Chords: Now let's take a look at augmented and diminished chords. In a basic form, we're going to alter the fifth. So let's take a look at that. Let's take a look with a simple triad. Let's take a G major triad. And if I raise the fifth degree, gives me an augmented chord. It would be one major third, sharp five. Now, these sharp fives are also using a lot of altar chords, but in its purest form, it gives us this augmented chord here. It's got quite a sort of slight unease, but an unsettling sort of It's used a lot in film music where it's a bit like, Oh, where's this going? Bit magic. It's a strange chord. You're not going to come across it too often in music, sort of songs, anyway, but it's always worth knowing about their existence. So our major chord with a sharp five. And then our diminished chord would be a minor chord, so one flat three. We've got a flat five. They're really unset and they're really uneasy. Now, we can take those diminished chords and add seventh to them and make a diminished seventh. That'll be a C diminished seventh right there. So I've got my middle finger on fret three of the A, my ring finger on fret four of the D, first finger on fret two of the G, and then pinky finger on fret four of the B string. The construction of a diminished seven chord would be one, flat three, flat five, double flat seven, one, flat three, flat five, double flat seven. So that'll be a four diminished. These diminished seven chords are made up of all minus third intervals, so they're called symmetrical cords because each interval between notes is exactly the same. And because of that, we can do this. So you can move the chord move the chord shape. Upper minor chord, upper minus third, sorry, on the fretboard. And then up again. And up another minor third. Technically provides the same chord because as you move up a minor third, all you're doing technically is inverting that first chord. So that'll be inversion, first inversion, second inversion, third inversion. So this way you can get in some really interesting sounds and quite advanced harmony when you play around with these inversions and diminished harmony. We'll touch a little bit more on how you can use them in re harms later on in another video, but it's always worth knowing that you can do those sort of fun little tricks and symmetrical chords, especially if you were to land on one, Mm hmm. You can do some fun little little tricks like that. Just to spice up the progression, add a little bit more movement to it. 20. Secondary Dominants: So I want to start talking about something heavy. I want to look into re harmonization and more unconventional harmony. As we sort of progress as a musician and move into more complicated sort of song structure, maybe jazz standards or maybe just want to add some extra spice into our songs, we want to break out of conventional harmony. Now we do that to sort of open up the canvas. We can introduce some altar chords, some chords that aren't necessarily in the key to give us some extra little sort of scalic playground. We can add some extra funny notes that are all. It's gonna turn their heads. You know, everyone's gonna ha. You know, Robin Ford's great at this, Scott Henderson, all sorts of fusion players. A lot of implicate all of these sort of concepts. So let's start with talking about secondary dominance. It's probably the easiest form of re harm, really. If I've got a standard 251 progression in C, right? So I'm going to go D minor, it's two, five G, and one C. I can add some tension there by altering my five chord. So I can go D minus seven. I can go G seven, sharp five, and then I can go C major seven. I can add some ninths D minus nine. Like so. So we're going to start adding some sort of extra spice. The secondary dominant is a dominant for it's a dominant chord for the chord you're leading to. So, for example, if I want to start on D minus seven, and I go to G, I could turn that D minus seven into a D dominant seven because that would be the five of G. And that would add some tension as I move towards the G, and then the G is the dominant chord moving towards the C. So I could comp, like D minus seven. We could say that further. We could add a secondary dominant to the D. So the dominant of D would be A. So I could add an A seven, and then I could go to D minor and D seven and then G seven and then C. And so on. You could go round and round and round. A really great example of this would be to add a little bit tension in a standard core progression. So if I play C minor and I want to go to E flat major and then we'll go to A flat major and then we'll go to G seven. That'll be our chord progression I'll turn around. I notice that I've got an E flat major seven there, and that will be the dominant for A flat major seven. So I could turn that to a dominant seven and add a secondary dominant. That sounds quite nice. At a passing chord, perhaps, wearing key. C. Cord two would be this D minus seven flat five up to cord three. Make it dominant, secondary dominant. Leading to the next quarter. You can see how it's just going to add a little bit of extra pizza, a bit of color, a little bit of spice to your chord progressions. It's going to give an improviser more room, more headroom to add tension notes, to ad outside things. It's really gonna elevate from that advanced player to a true professional. 21. Diminished Substitutions: Bild on this further. Let's add diminished substitutions. What I'm going to do is replace a dominant chord with a diminished seventh chord. Now, this works because diminished seventh chords are built up of minor thirds and kind of outline an altered chord. For example, if I've got a G dominant chord, I can substitute that. For a B diminished seven chord. I try to visualize this is play a diminished seventh chord from the third of your dominant chord. So if I was in A, third of A would be C sharp, so I'm going to play a C sharp diminished seven. If I'm in G, my third of G is B, so I'm going to play a B diminished seven. It basically creates a G seven flat nine chord. The B would be my third of G. I've got an F there, which is my flat seven. I've got an A flat, which acts as a flat nine. And then I've got a D there, which is my fifth of G. So all of that, that B seven, B diminished seven over G makes a G altered chord. And that's why this substitution works. Now, I can take that further because as we've already discussed with diminished harmony, diminished chords are made up of minor third intervals, and they're symmetrical. So I could play B diminish seven. I could play D diminish seven. I can play an F diminish seven. I can actually play G sharp diminish seven. So maybe sound like this. You can hear that really adds intention, especially as you go up through the minor third intervals. It's a little bit cliche, so I wouldn't necessarily always do that. But you can have some fun with this. So let's go back to that chord progression were using earlier for secondary dominance. I'm going to keep them in this progression, and then I'm going to add some diminished substitutions just to show you how it can add even more spice. I can take it further. Rather than descend, we descend. They're also great for passing from major chords to minor chords. So if I was to take a C major seven, and I was going to move to a D minus seven, I could use a C sharp diminished seven as a passing chord because that C sharp implies a seven flat nine chord. So we've got that diminished substitution of A seven. So what we're basically taking there is we're taking a secondary dominant, which is our A seven, and then we're substituting it to a C sharp diminished seven. So does sound like so. You can hear how that's got a really nice voice leading. You go in. I got that chromatic bassline. You've also got that dominant tension to take you into the next chord. 22. Tritone Substitutions: Let's take a look at tritone substitutions. Kind of self explanatory in a way. We've already discussed what triton was back in our dominant video. The tritone is made up of three tones, hence tritone, and it comes between the seventh, the flat seventh and our major third interval. So what we can do is we can substitute a dominant ord for another dominant chord that's three tones away, tritone away. So for example, a tritone away from G seven would actually be C sharp seven. Let's just count up just to prove that. So we've got G, we'll go up a tone to A. Let's go up another tone to B, and then we'll go up our third final tone to C shut. So what we can do in a standard 251 progression is I've got D, my two. Normally, I play G, my dominant seven, and then I resolve to a C major seven. But instead, I can substitute that G dominant seven for a tritone sub, and then you've got a nice chromatic baseline of voice leading, a little bit like what we had in our diminished substitution. But this time with a tritone sub, you can see how that leads nicely back to our root chord there.