 Hi. This is your music theory video explanation of the dominant seventh. At this point, we've been identifying triads. We've been going through a whole lot of music theory, and you probably have a good idea of the diatonic nature of triads, how a one chord operates, how a five chord operates, and the three notes in the chord. Chances are you're also probably analyzing music and taking a look at music and identifying where in music we're finding those triads. Now today, I want to talk about the dominant seventh chord. Now when we say a dominant chord, we're really talking about the five chord, and when we talk about a dominant seventh, we're talking about a five chord that has the seventh degree of the scale added into it. So now it's no longer a triad, there are actually going to be four notes in the chord. So we're going to get right to work. This doesn't take a lot of time to explain, and you'll begin seeing it in the music that you're analyzing. Now first of all, I've put on the screen here the diatonic triads in a major key, and for today we're really going to use that top line that you're looking at, which is in the key of C, and you can translate this to any other key. For instance, down below that we have the key of D. Now if we take a look at the key of C, you know right away that the one chord is a major chord, and we know that the five chord is also a major chord in a major key. And we know the others, the two is minor, the three is minor, the four is major, but today we're really going to focus on the five chord in a key. Now a dominant seventh chord is the five chord, but it's going to have another note associated with it. We've got the triad of G, B, and D, and now we're going to see a note above that, a fourth note, the F natural. You're going to see that in lots and lots of the music that you're analyzing, but it might get a little confusing. You're going to see what appears to be a five chord, but there's that extra F natural in there, and really what that does is just creates more tug pulling that chord back to the tonic C. So if you're analyzing a piece of music, we're in, let's use another key, let's use the key of D, so we'll have an F sharp and a C sharp, and here we have an F sharp and a C sharp, and you might look at something that has a one chord, we're in the key of D here, so there would be a D in the bass, probably, maybe an A here, maybe something like an F sharp here, and maybe another D here, and that very clearly, if we look at the notes, there's a D, an F sharp, an A, and another D, you're going to tell really quickly that that's a one chord, but when we look at a five chord, chances are very good that we're going to have an A in the bass, and we'll probably have that C sharp and E in there somewhere, creating that triad, so maybe we would have something like an E right here, and maybe we would have something like a C sharp right here, which is in the key signature, but the thing that might throw you off is that somewhere in that chord, you might see a G, and you might go, well, how does a G fit into an A chord? Well, really what we have there is A, C sharp, E, and the G is the seventh step of that A scale, giving us what we would call a five seven chord or a dominant seven chord, so as you do your analysis, when you're looking in there and you find what really looks like a five chord in a key, but that seventh step is represented simply, right, the five and the seven, and we're good to go, you're letting me know that you're seeing a dominant seventh chord, and it almost always resolves to a one chord. A dominant seventh has a very strong tug back to one, so I can't say always because there's always an exception to the rule, but that five seven resolves to a one chord almost all the time in your analysis. I hope that explanation makes sense. Go ahead and give it a try. Always be on the lookout for that seventh step of the five chord, giving you the dominant seventh feel or a five seven chord. Good luck, we'll see you the next time. Hello, this is your video explanation for the advanced music theory curriculum in my piano guitar class of the diminished seventh chord and the half-diminished seventh chord. This is not really difficult, it's really easy to grasp, but I just wanted to take a minute to make sure that you understood what was going on with it so you could correctly create half-diminished sevenths and diminished sevenths and identify them when you see them. So first of all, just let's look at a definition. In music theory, the half-diminished seventh chord, which is also known as a minor seventh flat five in jazz, is created by taking the root, the minor third, the diminished fifth, and the minor seventh of any major scale. Now if you break that down a little bit, what we're really talking about is a diminished triad, root minor third and diminished fifth, and then adding the minor seventh above that. Okay, so we're adding a fourth note to the triad and it's essentially the seventh step of the scale flatted by a half step. I'm going to show you that in just one minute, but let's go on to the definition of simply a diminished seventh chord, and that chord is a four-note chord that comprises a diminished triad, the same first three notes that we talked about with the half-diminished, plus the interval of a diminished seventh rather than a minor seventh. So what the distinction between these two is really the seventh step of the chord, alternatively regarded and harmonically as a major sixth, that seventh step above the root. Thus it is the one, the flat three, the flat five, and a double flat seven. Okay, let's just put this into something that you can relate to. Let's start in the key of C. It's really kind of simple to see if we're looking in the key of C. We have a root C, okay, then, and let's start with the half-diminished chord, and it would be a C, an E-flat, and a G-flat. That's our diminished triad, and then we would add simply a flat seven on there or a B-flat, and that would give us a half-diminished seventh chord based on the root of C. Okay, now a full diminished seventh chord would be C, E-flat, G-flat, same first three notes, and then that seventh step would have to be B-double-flat. Now the note that you actually end up hearing with that B-double-flat actually ends up sounding like the note A, and if we go back to our definition, you'll note here alternatively regarded as a major sixth, what they're really saying is that you'd hear it as an A-natural, but you're going to see it as what I previously described here as a B-double-flat. Okay, so this is a half-diminished in the key of C, and this is a full-diminished seventh chord. Half-diminished seventh chord and the key of C full-diminished. Let's go ahead and do one other example of it. Let's do it in the key of A, which would require F-sharp, C-sharp, and G-sharp, and let's create a G-sharp half-diminished seventh chord. Okay, typically the seventh step of the scale gives us a diminished sound, so we're going to start here with the G-sharp, and it is, I'm going to put the sharp in parentheses, because it is sharp already from the key signature. So from G-sharp to B is a minor third, and we would get that just as a result of the key signature. From B to D is another minor third. We would get that as a result of the key signature, and now we're going to that all-important seventh step of the scale. Okay, now the F is sharp as a result of the key signature. Okay, so right away we've got a G-sharp half-diminished chord, because the distance from a G-sharp to an F-sharp is a minor seventh, which is exactly minor seventh from G to F. So right there is our half-diminished seventh chord. Now if we wanted a G-sharp full-diminished seven, we have to do something else to that F-sharp. So we'd have G-sharp, B, D, there's our F-sharp, we make that an F-natural, and now we have a full diminished. From G-sharp to F-natural is a diminished seventh. Okay, hope that all makes sense. Go ahead and give a try to the worksheet that you've got, and I'm sure that you'll do a great job with this. Thanks and we'll see you the next time.