Altered chords should not scare anyone. Here are five shapes to explore when looking for a chord with some dramatic ...

Extended chords add other notes from the scale to the existing root-3rd-5th triad (for example, C-E-G), so if we add a 7th, we’d call this a major 7th chord (C-E-G-B). We can extend up to a 13th ...

Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 in D major, ‘The Clock’, is in a major key and uses mainly diatonic chords: A dominant seventh is used at the end of the phrase before the first time bar.

Where the major seventh differs, is that it is only one semitone below the keynote, so in a chord of C major 7, the ‘major’ refers to the actual note and not the major/minor tonality of the chord.