Blues Booster - #7 Diminished Scale - Guitar Lesson - Robert Renman

now i want to talk about the diminished scale this is a scale a lot of people are sort of scared of and confused about so i'll try and clarify this as clearly as i can it's a symmetrical scale completely symmetrical so that means the pattern or this the synonym it keeps repeating forever and there's two ways you can look at it you either start with a whole step and then you have a half step and then that just continues or the opposite where you start with a half step and then a whole step and then continues so let me play the a diminished scale starting with a whole step it sounds like this it's a cool sounding scale like if you use it the right way it's really sweet so let me play that on one string to make it really clear and we'll mention the intervals as we go along so if i'm starting on the one for a then we have a major second we have a minor third and this is something that's not unusual yet all these notes are part of the minor scale we have the fourth we're still inside the usual sound we have a flat five which is sort of the lucy sound but now things change a bit now we get a minor six or flat six note and then a major six then lastly a major 7th note which seems a little strange over minor chord and then the root note so in total we have 8 notes and that's unusual for most scales they either have five six or seven but this one has eight one more now the the the key is to know how to use it so as i indicated that we have a lot of notes that are the same as regular minor scales it's just towards the end it changed a bit but that scale can be used very well over a minor chord now the other way is if you play over a seven chord then you would most often start the opposite way you start with a half step and then a whole step and just to illustrate the power of this and the usefulness if i play that same scale that i showed you it's important that you get it the sound in your head as well like it sounds very exotic that way but that one that fit with a minor chord if i go to the four chord in a bluesy type of tune that would often go to d7 in this case if i play the exact same scale if we look at from an integral perspective or a scale design perspective now it's actually starting starting with a half step from d so that's an example of using the diminished scale over a seven chord starting with a half step and then go back to a minor it starts with a whole step so by using that one diminished scale i'm being i'm able to play just fine over an a minor and a d7 chord so now let's play over this backing track that goes between a minor and d7 and i'll start out by playing just the scale itself for a while and then i'll switch to playing some more real-world playing with blue slicks and i'll throw in the diminished scale here and there just to kind of highlight it and so there i try to highlight the diminished scale in a few interesting ways hopefully a few key points is that you can probably hear that these two sound very outside so the flat five together with a minor six or flat six they create the kind of weird sound but mostly all the other notes are quite inside to speak they fit quite well even that major seventh just have to remember that you want to focus on chord tones again so in that case we that's the one three five four uh for the one chord for for a minor they're still one three five but this is a minor third note but the problem is the five is not in the diminished scale but here is where you have to make a choice when you use the diminished scale you don't have to use all the eight notes you can use you can still use the five in there you're just now switching to more of a pentatonic sound and then if you want to do the diminished thing you can go it's all about the phrases that you create with these intervals so i think you should view the diminished scale as a as a tasteful little tool that you can use well as long as you do it wisely and not overdoing the runs because if you start being too much it sounds very much like just diminished scale going up and down and it sounds weird and doesn't fit in but i think it has its use in bluesy style of music if you do it the right way now another issue with diminished scale is it can be hard for your fingers to find the notes and you can get lost easily because it's even though it sounds simple that it's symmetrical in fact it can be quite hard to find good fingerings for it for your fingers so i want to highlight two fingerings that really helped me make the diminished scale a better friend so to speak so the first one uses four notes per string so i'm going to be playing that a minor or the a diminished that starts with a whole step i'll start on the lowest note so i'm going to start on the on the minor six and then next half step whole step and then a half step so you see those are four notes in sequence that's the pattern that you should remember so what we do next is we take the same pattern switch to the next string and we have the same pattern available one fret this direction and then repeats same here where it changes changes a bit it's here because the tuning differences between the g string and b and the b string you have to move it one fret extra this way and then back here the same pattern and that makes it possible to play it a little bit more fluid when and not get stuck in technical difficulties because it's i find it's quite easy to do slides you can play it fairly fast if you want to that way because i'm sliding a lot to to create these movements even if i go from high note and down i pick three notes and then i slide and the other way i start with picking the note and then slide up and i usually do a hammer on the last note so how i often use that scale is if i do a little run like that i want to come back in on a good note so that would mean the minor third of a somehow get into that sound of the progression so use it isn't it i mean that's how i view it one way to use it is a tool to move between your usual licks you know it went between two bluesy licks and just had that moving diminished thing in between now the other pattern that i find is very useful is one that looks like this and since it's symmetrical as we can see it leads to a lot of repetition and that's what's good about this one and it lets your hands stay in one position so you don't have to jump around so much and the way i'm playing this is i have we're basically creating two little patterns on the strings so on the i'm starting on the this the major six here and then the major seventh and then the one so i often do hammer on at the so i'm ending on the root note and then on the next string the pattern is different it's like this so that's the the second the minor third and the fourth now on next string i play the same one as i did on the d string the one i started on and on the e string i play the same one as i did on the g string so you can see that we're alternating between two different finger patterns i view them as little shapes that's a little shape to me the same one is available here and then that second one so then you can play easily through the whole thing and the cool thing with with this one in particular is that even if one benefit of course is easier to play in one spot but it's also the spot where you happen to be a lot when you play lead guitar it's that area of the neck that's box one on the pentatonic and we use it for blues scale that diminished pattern is available right inside there so you can then practice getting used to using some of these notes as as you're working on blue slicks in this position and the key thing is to of course not overdo it but it's a it's a scale that's worth exploring because it has a lot of potential and it can easily create some very interesting sounds and feelings and emotions out of it and since it's symmetrical it's uh it you can do you can explore it a lot and find wow i could do this i could do this you should spend time exploring the patterns that are created through uh the diminished scale on the fretboard and find ways to play the scale that you think are easy and comfortable but these two patterns that i showed you i find they are very useful and i hope you can take advantage of them as well

Channel: TrueFire

Views: 207,242

Keywords: blues guitar lesson, blues guitar, blues, blues booster, guitar, guitar lesson, guitar lessons, robert renman, truefire, Electric, Lesson

Id: O41TRihvuCE

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 14 2014