 Hi, everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to talk about just one chord, the dominant seventh chord, this one. And I have 10 approaches which will help you really understand the purpose of this chord. Train your ear, thus train your ear to acknowledge, okay, this is what the chord can really do, and also improve your theory. So in this two part lesson series, I'm going to take the dominant seventh chord and look at 10 ways in total, five in part one, five in part two, 10 ways to kind of train your ear and your theory to be aware of the sound of that chord and what it does for music, all the scenarios it can be used. And in my opinion, I think this is the most important chord in music. Yes, you have major, you have minor, but music does not have the ebb and flow, the tension, the resolution, the release, and the anticipation, you know, if you don't have this chord. And this chord is probably the oldest chord, along with major and minor. You would have major, you would have minor, and then you have this one, which is the dominant seventh. So I just want to share with you how I use this chord and how you can train your ear and hopefully use these approaches to, yes, first of all, train your ear. It's primarily a ear training awareness lesson, but also, well, you have to train your theory. So if you stick around, the theoretical concepts will also be super useful for you guys to try out. And there are a lot of piano things also along the way. So it's a very three dimensional way of looking at it. As I use this term very often, 3D, theory, ear training, and technique all in one. So that's what this lesson is going to do, just like pretty much all of our YouTube lessons. So before we get started, it'll be great if you could hit that subscribe button, there's a bell which you could hit for notifications, and let's get cracking, right? So the first way of studying the dominant seventh chord is to use it and apply it in what we call as the authentic cadence or the perfect cadence. So the perfect cadence or the authentic cadence is nothing but a five chord going to the one chord, okay? So the five is built from a scale. So if I have the G major scale for you as an example, G is the one, D is the five, G, A, B, C, D. One, two, three, four, five, so D becomes the five. And the five chord forms what we call as a primary dominant chord. So it's a seventh chord or the only seventh chord which exists in the major scale. So that's why I guess they call it the primary dominant. And the primary dominant which is in this case D seventh because D is the five of G has this magnetic attraction or this pull, this strong pull to the tonic chord. And the tonic we say is one. So the D seventh tends to want to go to G major. So I've written it here, D, F sharp, A, C which is the notes of D seventh resolves to G major which is G, B, D. And you may be observing how I've written it in a circle, the reason being inversions. You don't have to necessarily play the chord this way all the time. You can invert it or this or this, okay? So why have chosen this cadence or this authentic or the perfect cadence? Because it's the most obvious way to actually use the dominant seventh chord. So what I would hope when you're listening to a song is you identify this cadence. Some people think that you have to identify one chord and you should have that skill to identify one chord. But my advice for you is rather than think of it as one chord and put so much of pressure on yourself make it about two chords or three chords or four chords which are all part of a very, very common used to cadence. And we've talked about cadences so much on this YouTube channel. Just go to our channel type cadences. You'll get a lot of stuff, a lot of information on the topic. So let me just break this down for you on the piano and also let's look at a little bit of the ear training involved and all the skills you may need to develop along the way while learning and practicing the authentic cadence. So if you take D seventh, you can build that seventh as a major chord plus A dominant seventh. So that's D F sharp A C and that seems to go to D G B. So D F sharp A C, D G B, that's what we call as the authentic cadence. Now there are two notes which make this cadence really magnetic. So you go D F sharp A C, the C tends to really want to go to the B. So D F sharp A C, the C tends to really want to go to the B. So but you could also think of it as so I would urge you to practice it in two ways. One is stick the four up on top. Actually try and sing that. So four going to three. And then you could also do seven, eight, nine, ten. Last seven going to one because the seven is very close to one. So that'll be A C D F sharp which is still D seventh going to B D G. So this should give you a very good way of using the dominant seventh chord. Train your ear. Try to remember what did I say? Move that four to the three. Practice that. That's where you have your half step motion on the piano and then practice moving your seven going to the root or the tonic or the octave you could say. And this is a very good way of using the dominant seventh chord. You could even go into the root or the tonic or the octave you could say. And this is a very strong cadence, very popular, very common cadence. Practice it well and use the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths pretty much gives you the fifth. So you could resolve the five going to one by just drawing the circle, staring at it and resolving. All the best with that. Let's move on to the second way which I have for you to learn the dominant seventh chord and really drill it inside your brain. So in the second demonstration of the dominant seventh chord I wanted to plot out all the seventh chords of the major scale. So if you look at it and I'm trying to take different major scales for this lesson so we don't just stick on one and I've actually written it down for you. So you may want to get a copy of these notes. It's available on our Patreon and for a subscription you'll not only get this stuff for this lesson series you'll get it for every single lesson I will ever do and have ever done in the past couple of years at least. And we will prefer the same platform because most of the lessons have my handwritten notes as well as MIDI files in some cases, backing tracks which you could check out. So I have written down the D major scale here and I've written it down using seventh chords. Now the seventh chords of the major scale are one major seventh, two minor seventh, three minor seventh, four major seventh, five dominant seventh, six minor seventh and seven minor seventh flat five also known as a half diminished chord. Now why I wrote this stuff down is to show you that there is only one dominant seventh chord in the scale which is there which is diatonically there in the particular scale. The rest would probably form other dominant seventh chords which we call as secondary dominance. So if you take the D major scale its first chord or its one chord ends up forming a D major seventh chord whose formula is one three five seven so that will be D major with the major seventh. What is that? D sharp and that makes it diatonic. So to me the major seventh chord just feels very relaxing and a lot more stable than its counterpart dominant seventh chord which is that. Now this is always asking the question where do I go next. So when you are in the D major scale a good way to play around with this chord or this contrast is to play the one major seventh or start with the one and then see what the one dominant seventh will do. In this case and in all cases the one dominant seventh is the five of the four chord so the D seventh in this case is the five of this G major. So when you use D dominant seventh or D seventh it will resolve to G major seventh while when you use D major seventh its a very different flavor it will pretty much stay resolved. So in this approach of you digesting the sound of the dominant seventh chord my recommendation would be practice D major seventh and observe it as a more stable entity while the D dominant seventh is actually a chord which comes outside the D major scale which resolves to a chord within the D major scale in this case the G major seventh we call this the five of the four this is how I write it five of four it's also called as a secondary dominant chord we've done a very very detailed set of lessons on the secondary dominant chord using a bunch of song examples so watch those YouTube lessons as well and just to play around with it I just thought I'll pick a song you know so if you take falling in love with you you take so what did he do there? he did now see this is where you can actually squeeze in the D dominant seventh which has a completely different purpose and a completely different function than the these are all the atomic chords very stable but that's the dominant you can look at the chords we've written down there so where I actually have that contrast in this song you're still playing a D so you're starting with the D major seventh which is a very resolved start and then going to F sharp minor B minor and then only I'm sneaking in a four of the a five of the four D major D dominant seventh is the five of the G okay so this is another way I would like you to practice what I've called as one major seventh versus one dominant seventh in conclusion the major seventh is diatonic it's part of the scale while the dominant seventh is coming into a chord from the scale so it's an unstable entity and it resolves especially when you do the one major seventh compare it with the one dominant seventh you'll find that the dominant seventh chord resolves to the four major in this case G major seventh I've chosen the key of D so this is another nice way to train your ear and your theory brain to really get acquainted with the dominant seventh chord by contrasting it with its major seventh chord moving on so the most common or the most popular way you'll find probably of using the dominant seventh chord is in our favorite genre the blues the blues pretty much started it all in terms of contemporary music it's inspired arguably every genre in the past I don't know hundred odd years now what happens with the twelve bar blues it's a very standard progression it's one and then it goes to the four so I'm on the key of B flat B flat major two flats so this is your one then we go to the four E flat and then the five which is F so one four one five so the twelve bar blues progression is pretty much going to use the one chord the four chord and the five chord for its work the formula or the progression will be Roman I going to Roman IV back to Roman I and then you stay on Roman I demonstrated by these dots and then you go to Roman IV stay on Roman IV and back to one and then you go to five and then back to four back to one five ok now in some cases they kind of ignore the four they just repeat the one throughout that's also quite common in some cases they just continue the one here that's also common but you get the idea right the entire twelve bar blues framework is based on dominant seventh chords and here they are not really used in a resolving manner it's just used to bring up that idiomatic vibe of the blues which is characterized by the dominant seventh chord yes there are a lot of other things which characterize the blues scale like the blues genre like the scale the blues scale you also have the swing rhythm now we have covered a lot about blues we've even made a playlist on our YouTube channel check out our playlist and you'll find a lot of videos on all the way from beginner blues to something more intermediate and funky and all of that now just to show you again you play your twelve bar blues with dominant seventh chord so I'm going to recap that B flat seventh so I'll just do each chord four times four crotchets in a bar so one one B flat seventh one one and then I go to D four four again back to one one again and then the five which is F four which is E flat and one bar out of five F B flat twice so the blues is another great way to digest the sound of the dominant seventh chord so if you're watching this video and you haven't heard too much of the blues start listening to a lot of blues artists like BB King John Mayer plays a lot of blues if you like him you can listen to Ray Charles is a great piano player who plays blues and jazz so many blues artists so start listening to the blues it's a great genre it's really inspired so many people including me of course moving forward right guys so the next way to showcase dominant seventh chords would be in a line cliche movement as we call it popularly now you could either look at a descending line movement or an ascending line movement now all that's happening is the bass notes are going to move ascending chromatically or descending chromatically so if you see the chart here I've written down C to C major seventh going to C C major seventh then going to F major and what's going to happen here at the upper range of the notes you have the C and then going down to B because B is part of C major seventh C is part of the C major triad C major seventh da da da da and you kind of compare that line drop that line chromatic drop of course you can continue so many songs you all know something by the Beatles and yeah so what happened there descending line. Let me demonstrate that with the bass on the keyboard. So as a keyboard player you can drop your pinky to the major seventh and then you go dominant seventh eventually C seventh would resolve to the fourth of the scale which is F major so now the dominant comes up and so on we'll just take that for now now the that was the descending line cliche movement you can also consider the ascending line cliche movement which is a chromatic ascend now how does that happen with these chords I start with C major now I do a major which is actually like an a seventh but with a C sharp bass see C sharp is anyway part of the chord right so C major C sharp and C major keep climbing this actually D with D sharp bass is all into E minor or E major so this is another nice way of practicing the dominant chord because every middle chord in this climb will be basically the dominant chord so a over C sharp is actually a dominant chord hidden because it's a five of this one it's still like a it's still a five of the D or D's five is a so that seems to pull itself really strongly to D so line cliche is another really nice way to explore the sound of the dominant seventh chord or just the dominant chord in general the five going to one in that fashion you're in in the descending movement you do see be flat a very good songwriting tool so many songs do that or you can climb a lot of artists do either right so that was the line cliche usage of the dominant seventh chords all of these methods which I'm trying to convey to you are ways to really use this in a songwriting manner but also train your year so whenever you're faced with a dominant seventh chord you know exactly how it sounds and you also know what to do with it in what scenario can you use it or just have as many options as possible it's a very it's a beautiful chord and a very important chord so please learn it well let's move forward two three four right guys so the next way of using the dominant seventh chord is in the Dorian scenario on the Dorian scale so the Dorian scale basically is a major scale you form it by taking a major scale flat in the third raise the sixth with respect to the natural minor as we say or you can just say normal sixth major sixth and flat in the seventh so I've used E flat for our example there we go E flat Dorian right there E flat F G flat A flat B flat C don't do B that'll make it natural minor C D flat E flat now how this scale is generally formed is if you build triads you're gonna end up with a one minor and then if you jump to the four instead of getting a four minor which you get in the minor scale you'll be getting a four major so there's a one minor and a four major first digest this Dorian sound one to four that's one minor to four major and so on so what's interesting to note that when you do the four it'll be a flat C E flat and then you you climb further to it's actually a dominant seventh chord so your one is a minor seventh and your four is actually a dominance seventh chord so if you practice the Dorian combo which is one minus seventh X four dormitons seventh it's another nice way to digest the sound they developed like a nice turn around at the end which is again two dominant chords that's B dominant ending with a B flat seventh which is the five dominant of E flat. So anyway, we'll take you back to the E minor 7 and you look at it. You can keep doing this. One minor, four dominant, B. So B would be like your 6 flat, 6 flat sliding down to the 5 7th. All 7th chords. See it sounds very different if you change the quality of the 4. It almost sounds wrong. The sound wrong is just a very different sound. It doesn't at all belong to E flat Dorian, isn't it? So if you use the Dorian scale and just play this progression. One, five dominant. The dominant turn around which is the B in a funky way. I guess you're realizing quite a few songs which use this very funky and as you can see you tend to get carried away when you play this particular progression. Right guys? So so far we've covered five ways of using the dominant 7th chord. First off with the authentic or the perfect cadence 5 going to 1. Then we've looked at well just combining just getting to know the difference between the major 7th chord and the dominant 7th chord. So that I think is very important. Then we looked at using it in the most popular genre ever the blues. So that's the 12 bar blues for you. Then we look at a line cliche movement which is just chromatically going down or chromatically going up. And then lastly in this particular part we've looked at the funky Dorian progression which is using the Dorian scale a scale with a flat 3 and a flat 7 with a raised 6 if you call it that and one minor going to 4 dominant 7th. And then you do a turn around which is the B going to B flat which is your 6 flat dominant going to 5 dominant. So a lot of dominant 7th chord. So as this series is it's all about getting you to know that chord. The dominant 7th chord hopefully you really digest the sound of that chord or the flavor of that chord. And let's move on to another part now where we'll digest it even more. And I'll be giving you 5 more ways of really noticing the chord and trying to get it into your system. So I hope you found this lesson useful. Again this is Jason here from Nathaniel. Do consider subscribing to our channel, turn on that bell and all of these notes are available in a booklet which will be available on our Patreon. You can just check that out. It'll have this entire series. All the 10 ways of identifying, listening and applying the dominant 7th chord. It's all waiting for you on Patreon. And do consider liking the video, hitting that button, share the video with your musician friends. Why can't they also enjoy this? Isn't it? It's an amazing chord. I will see you guys in the next one or rather you will see me in the next one. Cheers.