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I was playing the other day and while strumming a few chords, I hit the C Maj 7 chord. I barre mine and the 3rd fret which looks like this…
I thought to myself, man, I sure come back to this chord alot. Not that it’s a great chord to resolve on but, but by itself it sounds great on the guitar. It’s bright yet rich in texture. I though, yep, this could be my favorite chord. Now, one of the things I like to do with the C Maj 7 is to play it in 4/4 time with a stum sort of like this.
DDUUDU DDUUDU DDUUDU
In addition, I like to switch to a B min 7 chord on the second measure and then come back to the C Maj 7 on the third and so on.
For reference, the B min7 chord looks like this…
Here’s the pattern I like to play (sort of)
C Maj7 B min7 C Maj7 Bmin7
dduudu ddddudu dduudu ddddudu
When I record this pattern on my loop station or in GarageBand I discovered that there are a couple of really cool sounding scales we can use to solo over this. The first one, which actually supprised me, is the D Maj scale. It supprised me because for the longest time I thought this pattern was in the key of C. Nope, it’s in the key of D! If you’re not up to date on your scales, the key of D has a sharp C and a sharp F (C#, F#). You can play the D scale all over this pattern but it sounds better when you play to resolve around the root note D.
The other scale that sounds cool is the B Pentatonic minor scale. You may know this as the Blues Scale. Why does this scale sound good over this patter you say? Well, this is a topic for another day but suffice it to say that B minor 7 is the relative minor of D Maj, meaning that it’s 3 half steps below it. You can play the pentatonic scale over the relative minor chord. It doesn’t sound too shabby if you play it over the C Maj 7 too if you keep the root note D in mind.
Now, it looks like I strayed a bit from my original intent of this post which was to talk about my favorite chord (C Maj 7). Well, not really because not only do I like the sound of the chord, I like it because I know what to play over it when jamming with the B min 7 chord in the loop.
