Class 7

Sorry I'm a little late posting for this class. And I promise we'll get to your compositions soon enough.

This class was a review of last week. We went over triads, seventh chords, and inversions. Seventh chords are tricky because you have to know the lingo that goes along with the symbols. Remember this:

• A plain 7 (like G⁷) refers to a dominant seventh -- a major triad with a minor 7th
• A minor 7 (like C#m⁷) refers to a minor triad with a minor 7th
• A major 7 (like Abmaj⁷) refers to a major triad with a major 7th
• A diminished 7th and half diminished 7th are similar except for the 7th (dim 7th has a dim 7th, a half dim has a minor 7th)
• Other 7th chords explicitly spell out the notes (like a Cm^maj7 -- a minor triad with a major 7)

We also discussed the diatonic chords (labeled with Roman numerals). Remember? They are:

I ii iii IV V vi vii°

So if we build diatonic triads on each of the notes of a major scale, we get a major 1, a minor 2, a minor 3, a major 4, a major 5, a minor 6, and a diminished 7.

Once we know what chords are diatonic, we can easily analyze a lot of music by determining what chords are being spelled and figuring out what inversion the chord is. Pretty easy, right? I hope so. We will soon see chords that are not entirely diatonic, and we will need to determine why they aren't diatonic and what function they serve. (For those of you who have heard the term functional harmony, that's what we will be learning.)

Thanks for your faithfulness and willingness to learn. God bless!

Josh

P.S. Homework coming soon.