Jambole.com – for Guitarists

This is a different way of using the Minor 7th Pentatonic to get some feels, sounds and tensions that are a little different than you’d normally expect from this old favorite of Guitarists.

There are many approaches to this technique the one I’m going to talk about this time starts with the concept of Polychords.

Polychords

The concept of polychords give you a different way of looking at some of the more complex chords. So, for example, A C Major 7th chord is made of the chord tones C, E, G and B. If we look at these as though they are 2 overlapping sets of triads we have. C, E, G (which is a C Major) and E, G, B (which is an E Minor). So a C major 7th chord could be thought of as a E Minor Chord played on top of a C Major Chord.

Minor 7th Pentatonic Substitutions for Major 7ths

We can also use 7th chords as easily as triads, so for example. An EMinor 7th over a C Major 7 is a C Major 9th chord.

Lets combine pairs of 7th chords that can be found in a C Major Scale.

We have:-

C Maj7 + Emin7
C Maj7 + G 7
C Maj7 + Bm7b5
C Maj7 + Dmin7
C Maj7 + FMaj7
C Maj7 + Amin7

I’ll let you work out the extended chord name for each. In this application the name doesn’t really matter, what we are interested in though is that in these stacks of chords we can see a EMin7, a DMin7 and an AMin7.

If we used the notes of a G Major scale, we can also create a C Maj7 root chord. This scale gives us EMin7, AMin7 and BMin7.

So between these 2 scales we have found 4 minor chords that are in some way related to the C Major 7 chord, these being AMin7, BMin7, DMin7 and EMin7.

Alternatively you can think of these as the minor 7th chords based on the 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th scale tones.

For my ears, putting them into the Most to least accessible order we have…

Minor 7th based on the 6th note of the major scale.

In this case I’m playing an A Minor 7th Pentatonic over a C Major 7th chord. This is pretty standard stuff.

Am7onCMaj7.mp3

Minor 7th based on the 3rd note of the major scale.

This time I’m playing an E Minor 7th Pentatonic over a C Major 7th chord. Notice I don’t have a C anywhere in my pentatonic scale. This is one of my favorite voicings.

Em7onCMaj7.mp3

Minor 7th based on the 2nd note of the major scale.

This time I’m playing a D Minor 7th Pentatonic over a C Major 7th chord. It’s a bit more out there this time…

Dm7onCMaj7.mp3

Minor 7th based on the 7th note of the major scale.

Finally we have a B Minor 7th pentatonic over a C Major 7th chord. See what you think.

Bm7onCMaj7.mp3

Concluding.

So there we have it. I’ll put something similar together for Dominant and Minor chords in the near future. If you fancy trying this yourself, here’s the backing loop that I used.

CMaj7.mp3

Enjoy!