7th Chords on Ukulele

In this video we're gonna learn about 7th chords, we're gonna learn how to play 5 of these bad boys, and we're also gonna learn what on earth do numbers mean when we see a number after a chord. So grab your ukulele, join me for this one, it's gonna be loads of fun. So what we need to know first of all, is there any major or minor chords. Only has 3 notes in it. Even if we play those notes over 4 strings or more strings, any major or minor chord only has the first, the 3rd, and the 5th note of the major or minor scale. Major scale for major chord, minor scale for minor chord. When there is a number written after your. Chord name, for example C7, that number refers to another note that has been added to our three notes. In this case, with seventh chords, such as all the ones that we'll cover here, it's actually the dominant seven. So what we actually mean when we see, for example, C7, what that actually refers to is C dominant 7. We do have major seventh chords which are a different set of chords. So let's have a look at our first example which is super super easy. All we have to do to play our first chord is put our first finger at the 1st fret of the 1st string, and this is a C7 chord. Now straight away, we can hear that's got a pretty distinctive sound. Uh, we often summarise that as being bluesy. But these chords are not exclusive to blues songs or the blues genre. These get used all over pop songs. Any song that can be played on ukulele can have seventh chords in it. What we've done there is we've taken the C note that we were playing from a standard C chord and moved it back to frets, 12. And that is the definition of 1/7 chord, a dominant seventh chord. We have the three notes that make up that chord, in this case C, E, and G. And then it's the octave of that, so the 8th note perhaps we can think about that as, that gets taken back by two frets and it's a flattened 7th, or what we call a dominant 7th. And for C7. It's as easy as that, but of course there's a bit of complexity there behind what actually gives the chord its name. Another 1 finger 7th chord that we can play is moving that first finger to string 3, still at fret 1, and this is an A 7. The normal A major chord would have two fingers, so this is kind of even easier than that. More complex chord, actually easier to play. This is A 7. We've covered an E7 in one of my earlier lessons. And this is very useful because this uh E7 often gets used in place of a standard E major chord. cause the standard E major chord is very difficult to play, it takes four fingers. And we can play it as a barcode and it's tricky to change to that from, you know, an A chord for example. But E7 pretty easy and very easy to change from an A chord to an E7 or an A7 to an E7, which happens a lot. The other very, very common and pretty easy seventh chord is a G seventh chord. Which is often one of the first ukulele chords people learn. When we're learning songs in the key of C, we have C, F and G. but that G is often a G7 cause G7 kind of has this pull to resolve. To a C major. G7, C, G7C. It has a resolve when we finish it with C, which is the other function of these uh seventh chords. They can have a pull, a stronger pull from five chord back to 1, and that of course I'm referring to the numbering system of diatonic chords, the Nashville numbering system that we've looked at earlier in this series. Of ukulele lessons. The final most common 7th chord is a D7 but this can be tricky. I would encourage that we have a go at this because we just want to have a quick try of how to play a bar chord. So this is where I've got a flat 1st finger over all 4 strings at the 2nd fret. And then you can put your middle finger or your third finger, I think it's more comfortable personally it's more comfortable with my 3rd. 1234. And that's our D7 chord. This was our normal D cord. And there's our D7 chord. We can play this 123 noodle finger there. Either way, we've still got that kind of tension to these 7th chords, this bluesy sound. And also, This resolve whenever we go from the 5 chord to the 1 chord in any particular key. That's, you know, mixing a few different concepts together. So the main concept is that 7th chords take the octave or one note out of your chord, uh, the note that is the letter name of that chord, for example C. Make that higher note the dominant seventh one, a flattened 7th, and that is our seventh chord of that name. Shapes C7. A 7 E 7 G7 And a couple of ways of playing. D7, option 1. Option 2.