Guitar Tricks Online Guitar Lessons

Using Outside Triads

 

When you want to create a dominant 7 sound, you are not just limited to however many voicings of that particular chord you may know. You can use a number of "outside" triads to make it sound hip while still making it sound like a dominant 7 chord. In this lesson I'll teach you this concept and show you a really cool example that uses it. After breaking it down, we'll play through it with the backing track.

Anders Mouridsen
Instructor Anders Mouridsen
Tutorial:
Blues Rhythm Riffs
Styles:
Blues
Difficulty:
print notation download lesson open guitar tuner
Using Outside Triads song notation
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Using Outside Triads By Anders Mouridsen

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Questions & Answers

1 year ago
what exactly does it mean outside triads, and why did he play those triads in the D7 key?
Josh Workman 1 year ago

Hi and good question. I would personally call those "inside" triads because they're actually found INSIDE of the D7 scale. What I mean is, if you harmonize each degree of the D7 scale (D Mixolydian scale or D major scale with a flat 7), you get a certain set of resulting triads. This particular scale is D E F# G A B C. If I skip every other note of the first five notes, I get D F# A (D major). If I continue through the scale this way, I then get E G B (E minor), F# A C (F# diminished), G B D (G major), A C E (A minor), B D F# (B minor), C E G (C major). The D7 chord is D F# A C. Notice that A minor has two of those notes and sounds pretty closely related to D7, right. C major only shares one note with D7 but it still sounds related when you go back and forth between that and D major. If your eyes are rolling back in their sockets right now, maybe check out some of GT's theory classes. If you throw out all of the theory and use your ears, the real reason is, "Because those chords sound good together." I hope this helps a little! Josh Workman, GT instructor