Dominant 7th Arpeggios for Guitar
By Shawn Bradshaw

The guitar arpeggios that you are going to learn in this lesson can be used in any style of music. But if you are a jazz or blues guitar player, these arpeggio forms are essential in helping you improvise over chord changes. Blues is based around dominant 7th chords.

So these dominant 7th arpeggios can be used to augment the pentatonic licks that you might normally play in blues setting. If you are a jazz guitar player, learning to play over the chord changes of a tune is key. And learning to negotiate the dominant 7th chord is no exception.

What is a Dominant 7th?

When you see a chord symbol like D7 or A7, that is what is known as a Dominant 7th chord. The name comes from old terms that were used to describe the degrees of a major scale.

Chords are built from scales. And the 4 note chord that is build from the 5th degree of a C major scale is a G7 ... a G Dominant 7. Basic 4 note chords are created by skipping every other note in the scale for a total of 4 different notes. So a G7 chord has the notes G B D and F.

C D E F G A B C D E F = C major
        |___|___|___| = G7 chord

The reason that you might what to refer to this type of chord as a Dominant 7th rather than just calling it a "7th chord", is that there is more than one type of 7th chord. If I went through the same process that I did to create the G7 on the other degrees of the major scale, I would get some of those other types of 7th chords. There are major 7, minor 7, minor 7(5), and diminished 7th chords. So 7th chords any of those, plus our dominant 7th. Dominant 7th is just a term to clear up what type of 7th chord you are referring to.

Page 2, Guitar arpeggio charts and chord functions

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