You can watch the youtube version of this here, with some fun little bits of 'animation' added:

The Minor7th Chord

What is the minor 7th chord? Let's see if gimblo can explain it.

Well, gimblo isn't great at explaining...

It is an interesting chord that is very versatile for what the music people call 'constant structure' composition, where you often just shift around a fixed chord by some number of semitones. Equivalently, it basically means you can take a recording of playing an entire chord, put that recording into a sampler, and jam with it.

A C Minor 7th chord is made up of C, Eb, G, Bb.

Minor7th chords are nice because they are a bit ambiguous sounding, so they can be used kinda percussively. It's not really musical but it sounds superficially like music. That makes it great for house and techno vibe tracks.

Try it out and see how it sounds! Here's an example track made for this tutorial:

Now go and make some music. Gimblo needs some more tracks for its minor7th chord music club!