Seventh Chords: Drop D & DADGAD · Fretboard View

Drop one string, then three — and add a note to every chord.

Volume 8 gave the triads of Drop D and DADGAD. This is the same fourteen keys in each tuning with a fourth note in every chord — Am7, Bm7b5, Cmaj7, G7 — and the shapes are different entirely, because a seventh chord has to find one more string for its extra tone. On a guitar tuned to open fourths and fifths there is usually one to hand.

Two tunings, and the fourth tone changes both

With triads, DADGAD held a whole key under one hand in five of its fourteen keys. With sevenths it does so in every one — 37 positions in all, two or three a key — because the retuned strings put so much of the harmony on open strings and the seventh lands beside it. Drop D held no key at all with triads and holds two with sevenths, A minor and C major, both at the nut. Everywhere else it keeps volume 8’s answer, tightened: every other key is covered by two positions exactly one fret apart, where the triads needed two.

How it works

Every key gets a spread. On the left, the grid: every seventh chord of the key, drawn once at the fret it starts on, as a shape you can actually play. Read down a column and you have one chord all over the neck; a rule in the margin marks the frets one hand covers from a place where the whole key is within reach. On the right, the scale on the neck, and the positions that hold the key with all seven chords drawn across them.

Also inside

Six progressions as sevenths — the three-chord, the axis, the doo-wop, ii–V–I, rhythm changes and the twelve-bar — worked through both tunings, in every key they belong to. The doo-wop and rhythm changes are major-key progressions, so they appear in the seven major keys. The other four appear in all fourteen.

Every shape was found by a search that checks it against a real hand: four frets, no finger asked to be in two places. Nothing here works only on paper.

Fourteen keys, twice: Drop D and DADGAD, major and natural minor, as seventh chords.

For fingerstyle and open-tuning players who have the triads and want the chords a song actually uses, and for anyone who retuned and found the jazz chords had gone.

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Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 17. oktober 2026