GUITAR CHORDS – Pt 2 – MAJOR 7TH CHORDS

Hi there,

In the first blog on the CAGED system we talked about how you can move your basic open major chords up the neck to produce 60 different voicings of the same chord.

You can now apply the same process to your minor chords and also your extended 7th chords. This will give you a huge wealth of different options when playing, plus when wanting to work out your favorite bands songs, you’ll be able to work out what chords they’re playing much easier.

There are 3 main types of 7th chords that tend to be used the most in my experience. These are Major 7, Minor 7 and Dominant 7 (7) chords.

 Let’s take the Major 7 chords as an example. So the open caged shapes are as follows:

So what you can do now is move the shapes up the neck by ‘barring’ what would have been some of your open strings.

Like with your Major chords you have to change your fingering around to do this. So using these 5 shapes you can now play the same chord in 5 different positions down the neck, giving you a wide range of options Let’s take B maj7 for example – below you can see how to play B major 7 in all 5 shapes:

When you are playing and writing songs, you’ll now have so many more options and voicings by using this system.

Thanks for reading!
Rock ‘n’ Roll
James

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