Martin taylor: the Major 7th
Adding a little jazz flavour to your blues licks can open up a wealth of new possibilities in your playing – this exclusive six-part series shows you how!
7th Heaven
Tutor: Martin Taylor | Gear used: Martin Taylor Vanden Caprice archtop
Hello and WelCoMe to the fourth instalment of my series on jazz blues. We’ve been looking at filling in some of the ‘missing notes’ from the minor pentatonic scale – the 6th, 9th and major 3rd – and seeing how they work against the backdrop of the wellknown I IV V blues progression. I hope you’ve been experimenting with these added notes and finding out how they can embellish a straightforward blues and begin to make it sound altogether more jazzy.
This month, we’re going to look at another note that we can add to the assembly, the major 7th. This note is a little bit different to the ones we’ve looked at so far in that it has to be handled sensitively, otherwise things can go very wrong indeed. In order to illustrate what I mean, try this simple experiment: in the key of A major, the major 7th is G#, right next door to our root note – and herein lies all manner of woes. If you play an open A string and then play the G# over the top, you’ll hear what I mean about it needing careful handling. Isolated like this, it sounds pretty bad! But strangely, when the major 7th is placed in a phrase correctly, it sounds really sweet. In fact, if you play any major 7th chord on the guitar (don’t confuse them with dominant 7ths, they’re as different from one another as chalk and cheese), you’ll hear how sweet the interval can be. It really helps turn an ordinary major chord into something richer and more harmonically pleasing. We just have to remember to handle it with care.
In this month’s solo example, you’ll hear how I sometimes use the G# as a passing note – in other words, I use it to slide into another scale tone – but other times, it’s present as a fully paid up member of the scale in its own right. As usual, the thing to do is to work through the examples and discover how you can use it in your own solos. Happy hunting!