Martin's Fascinating Internal Dialogs

Sixes and Sevens

We are now armed with enough knowledge to build some structures that take us beyond simple major and minor chords.

Major Sixth Arpeggio

It's been a while, so let's remind ourselves what our full major shapes look like:

By including a note 6, which is a M6 above the root,¹ we get what is known as a Major 6th arpeggio. This is one of the most important basic chord/arpeggio types in jazz.

By the way, from now on we won't always show the chord tone numbers (1, ♭3, 3, 5 etc.) in the diagrams. We'll also generally not show the roots as red and blue, instead we'll show them as square notes with white dots.² Notes being added to an existing structure will be usually be white with black text.

Although we define note 6 as being a M6 above the root, it can be easier to think of it as being a M2 above 5 or a m3 below the root.³ Here are some suggested ways you might like to practise these similarly to what we did with the more basic forms.

[6]₃6

[5]₃6

[4]₃6

[3]₃6

[2]₄6

The Minor 6th Arpeggio

Let's now remind ourselves what our basic minor arpeggios look like:

To change these into Minor Sixth chords, we again note 6, a M6 above the root wherever we can. Notice that the minor sixth chord doesn't actually contain the note a minor sixth⁴ above the root. The ‘minor’ in the name refers to ♭3, not 6.

We can practise these in the usual manner:

[6]₃m6

[5]₃m6

[4]₃m6

[3]₃m6

[2]₄m6

Our diagrams are beginning to get a little dense and I don't blame you if you're beginning to feel a little perplexed so let's take a step back for a moment.

If you look at the 6 and m6 diagrams as arbitrary collections of notes that need to be memorised, you will likely remain bewildered for a long time to come. If, however, you learn how to construct them for yourself using the ideas we've covered so far, they'll soon start to make sense.

This would be a good time to review all the material covered so far. Make sure you are able to do the following before continuing.

• Construct full major and minor arpeggio shapes by combining red and blue subshapes (some of which will be incomplete.)
• Be aware, when you playing through the arpeggios, of whether the note you are playing in a 1, a 3 or a 5. Try to get familiar with how each note relates to the other notes in the shape both in terms of fretboard ‘geography’ and, more importantly sound.
• When you're confident with this, include note 6 in any subshapes that will will admit it.

Cultivating this kind of awareness is (in my opinion) more valuable than playing through a collection of shapes by rote without really understanding how they're structured.

Dominant Seventh Arpeggios

When we add a m7 to major arpeggios, we get the so-called ‘dominant7th’ (or just ‘7th’):

Although it is a very important kind of chord, we won't be paying too much attention to the dominant 7th shapes. The reason for this will become apparent in later articles.

Minor Seventh Arpeggios

Adding a m7 to minor shapes gives us ‘minor 7th’ shapes.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the minor seventh shapes are identical to the major 6th shapes except for the numbers that we assign the notes. This idea of the same shape representing different musical structures depending on which one we consider to be the root is a very powerful one.

Minor 6th arpeggios, too, hide a variety of other chords each of which take a different note as its root. In fact the vast majority of the chords/scales/arpeggios used in Jazz can be derived more-or-less directly from either the major 6th or minor 6th shapes. The great pianist Barry Harris has developed an entire theory based largely on this concept.⁵

‘But what about major seventh chords?’, I hear some of you fume. Most jazz education book reason that, because major triads are constructed by combining notes 1, 3 & 5 of a major scale, it is only natural that the most basic four-note chord would use 1,3, 5 & 7, where ‘7’ is 11 semitones above ‘1’ (or a semitone below 8). There are a couple of problems with this line of thought though:

• The major seventh chord is a much more distinctive, even harsher sounding chord that the major 6th
• It tends not to sound good in certain voicings (especially where note 7 is lower in pitch that note 1)
• When accompanying, it tends not to sound good if the note being accompanied is 1 (which is generally the case at the end of a song/tune.)
• When used as the tonic chord it tends to sound ‘active’, i.e. it wants to move to another chord

The major 6th chord is much more suitable as a default four-note major chord. It sounds more natural; every ‘inversion’ sounds good; every lick etc you learn can be applied in a minor 7th situation; outside of theory books, it is probably a more common sound than the major seventh one.

Even worse than this is the insistence by some authorities that the standard tonic chord in a minor key is the minor-major seventh (1 ♭3 5 7). This strongly-flavoured chord has all the disadvantages of the major 7th plus the fact that it often sounds downright bizarre when shoehorned into a tonic situation. The minor 6th (or, in a ‘pure minor’ situation just the straight triad) is generally a better choice. In most situations, the minor 7th (1 ♭3 5 ♭7) chord is too ‘active’ to be suitable for use as a tonic chord.

None of this is to say that there's anything wrong with the major 7th or minor-major 7th chords. In fact they are an integral part of most types of jazz. They just shouldn't be considered to be the default four-note chords. Like most of the structures we use in jazz, they can be derived easily from the 6th and minor 6th shapes we'll be concentrating on.⁶

There are two important situations where ‘seventh’ chords should be thought of as tonic chords. A dominant 7th is usually the tonic in a Blues form; and a minor seventh is the usually the tonic in a ‘Minor Blues’.

These are mainly personal views, so feel free to ignore them.

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