Chord Of The Week 9/1/16 TWINKLEJAZZ2- Jazz V7 3rd & 7th chord frags

bigjon · January 2016

TWINKLE JAZZ 2

I'm building a solo jazz chord-melody arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star from the ground up, gradually introducing more complex extensions and substitutions as we go. The key is Cmajor, to keep the theory easy to follow. Video at the bottom of this post.

Today we're looking at the second-to-last chord on the words "...what you...", which is a G7, the V chord (dominant), leading in to the Cmaj I chord on the word "...are." (link to last week's tutorial at the bottom of this post). The melody note is D xxxx3x and the bass note is a G 3xxxxx, in the video I play the chord as a G7 3x343x at 0:27.

Initially we'll always ignore the bass note and the melody note. If we were playing in a group the bassist and melody instrument would be taking care of those in any case, so our job would just be to define the harmony above the bass note. We'll put them back in later to complete our solo jazz guitar arrangement.

The key to getting a chord to sound jazzy is to ignore the 5th and focus instead on the 3rd and 7th. The 3rd note of the C major scale CDEFGAB (the parent scale) up from G (the root note of the current chord) is note B (3rd string 4th fret) and the 7th note of the C major scale up from a G is note F (4th string 3rd fret). For solo jazz arrangements I recommend mostly putting the 3rd and 7th onto strings 3 & 4, to leave strings 1&2 clear for jazzy extensions and melody notes, and leaving strings 5 & 6 clear for bass notes. So our 3rd & 7th partial chord for V7 chords is:

V7 - G7(no root): xx34xx or x x 9 10 x x

As with last week's Imaj7 chord xx24xx or xx99xx I put down 2 versions of the 3rd & 7th on the 3rd & 4th strings: this week the first voicing that I'm using on the video has the 7th on the 4th string whereas the Imaj7 had the 3rd on the 4th string. If your chord progression is moving round the cycle of fifths (and in Jazz this happens a lot!), where the root notes of this chord and the next chord are 5 notes of the scale apart, then by swapping which string out of the 3rd or 4th string takes the third of the chord and which takes the seventh from one chord to the next, you will create voicings that are right next to each other on the fretboard and will flow smoothly, here xx34xx into xx24xx.

The fact that the two versions of this chord xx34xx and x x 9 10 x x are the same geometric shape gives us a hint at the possibility of TRITONE SUBSTITUTION as we put the bass note back in. The two notes by themselves are 6 semitones apart, exactly half-way round the 12-note chromatic scale, so they are symmetrical to each other and there is no way of telling which note of the two is the 3rd or the 7th of the chord. If the note B is the third, then the chord has bass note G - 3x34xx or x 10 9 10 x x. If the note F is the third, then the chord would have bass note Db - x434xx or 9 x 9 10 x x. So we can SUBSTITUTE one bass note of a V7 chord for another bass note a TRITONE (= 'three tones' = six semitones) away.

We won't do that here, however, because the melody note is a D which would clash horribly with a tritone-substituted Db bass note. So we'll stick to a G7, and the full chord with the melody note on top is -

G7: 3x343x

as at 0:27 in this video of me playing a 30-second arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

Last week's CoTW on the Cmajor I chord is at

http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/64757/chord-of-the-week-2-1-16-twinklejazz1-jazz-imaj7-3rd-7th-chord-frags