Cool Guitar Chords in 7/8 Time

In this video guitar lesson I’ll be showing you some interesting sounding chords in an interesting time signature. 7/8 time. I often refer to guitar chords like this as “the cool chords”. They make use of open strings to create some unique chord sounds.

Learn all about rhythms and time signatures (including odd time signatures) in my comprehensive Rhythm Guitar Mastery course.

(Video Guitar Lesson)

The Cool Chords

While the guitar chords below have some more complicated names, they are really just fancy ways to play a Bm, G, A and D chord. The “cool” way of playing those chords. All 4 of these chords have the same top 3 notes. All that changes are the bass notes.

Cool Chords in 7/8 Time Tablature

Here is the guitar tablature for this progressive rock chord progression. The picking is indicated above.

Understanding 7/8 Time

The easiest way to think of time signatures is that the top number represents the number of beats in a measure, and the bottom number equals which rhythm gets 1 beat. So a simple way to think of 7/8 time is that there are 7 beats in a measure and the 8th note gets one beat.

There is a little more to it than that, but I can’t go into a more in depth explanation of compound odd time signatures here. In the tablature you will see that the 8th notes are grouped into 2 groups of 2 and a group of 3.

One common way to get a handle on 7/8 time is to count the different groupings of 2’s and 3’s. So you might count this example 1 2 1 2 1 2 3. And each time you say 1 is where you are also going to accent.