Diminished Chords on Guitar

today we're going to talk a little bit about diminished chords now the very definition of diminished means less than whole as you can imagine this does wonders for the self-esteem of a diminished chord being that it's name is literally pointing how it is shortcomings which makes it no surprise that diminished chords sound so unstable because of this glaring lack of self-esteem so I thought we'd kind of break down what they mean and hopefully it they will be more easily understood when to use them what they are etc cetera now there are three types of diminished chords as a diminished triad a half diminished or minor 7 flat 5 chord or a full diminished chord which is also known as a diminished 7th chord so let's start with a diminished triad again a triad is just a three note chord so diminished triad would be a minor chord with a flat 5 now what does that mean let's take let's take a let's take a right here right so a minor is a a C and E playing together mid chord is a nice minor sounding chord now if we were to flatten the 5 the 5 being 1 2 3 4 5 right here this e here to flatten it flatten it it make any flat right so on our and arpeggio for a diminished triad in a would be an a C and E flat now we can put that together as a chord starting with the root note here and it would look like this we'd have the a on the fifth fret of the E string the C on the 3rd fret of the a string and then the E flat right here but look at that that's oh my god that's ridiculous ok so I think especially like in rock music diminished triads will be more used between just using the flat 5 as its own thing between the 1 so I'll demonstrate that right now now if we just take a power chord right in a power chord and we kind of shoe like a rock chug we can flatten the 5 just by taking your ring finger going your middle finger like this so so we're taking a cord and we're making it less stable by altering the relationship between the 1 and the 5 which is like the strongest relationship in music right now technically I don't have the minor third in this chord I've just taken a to know thing so one thing you can do with diminished chords you can take existing chords and make them less stable and add a lot of tension just by flattening the 5 now if we want to take a more appropriate hand position for a chord that is technically a diminished triad you do an inversion so let's do that same thing we're going to do an a a C and E flat let's start with the C now this is a really great lesson in intervals right so a diminished chord is essentially stacked intervals what that means is an interval is just two space between two notes so with an a we have a three note interval also known as a minor third right now a minor third from a minor third will end up giving you that flat five that's why that first kind of voicing we did mmm we're just going from five e to 3a and down a string back two frets is a way to get to a minor third if you just repeated that here and minor third minor third we're stacking these intervals on top of each other but we're going to do it now and in a way that makes more sense by doing an inversion where we play the the third first so the C is going to be first we're gonna have to see here we're going to have the flat five of a here there's that minor cleared again but we're going to take the octave a here so the diminished triad voicing we're gonna learn looks like this and not just remember your root no is actually we're middle finger is so you can kind of take a root note that you know maybe if you know this is a G you can play it's triad by octave and down and then making that chord just like that right so those are diminished triads and again we're just taking two minor thirds and stacking them on top of each other now the next type of diminished chord would be a half demisch more commonly known as a minor 7 flat 5 chord now I'm going to link to a video I did on just minor 7 flat 5 chords but again I think these are some of the prettiest diminished chords like for example here's a B minor 7 flat 5 now the reason it's called half diminish is because we're taking those minor thirds but then we're adding um an interval it's not a minor 3rd right so and a half diminished minor 7 flat 5 but we're taking a minor 7 chord and we're flattening the 5 so it's a cool name of court because it's telling you exactly what you're doing now these are really good and not just jazz progressions but uses like passing tones now the half diminished chord the minor 7 flat 5 chord occurs on the seventh note of any scale right so in the key of c we have c d e f G a B so in the key of C B half diminished or B minor seven flat five would be the chord that you could use the natural extension and the key so what does that mean let's take a progression where we just go from a C major to an a minor and back to a C right to kind of create a little bit more tension and release as they call it in chord progressions we're going to add that half diminished minor 7 flat 5 chord in there on the beat right so we need a voicing for that the voice you're going to use is an a string root voicing that looks like this so my root note is on the B the next note is going to be the D string three D to G with my middle finger my pinkie is going to be on the D which is 3b right so it would be two three two three not really a super difficult voicing but has a cool sound to it now this is going to naturally resolve as this this is the seventh chord in the key it's going to naturally resolve on the one and again this is the key of C so now if we added it in that progression like we did before between the a and the C it's going to create more tension that's going to be released with the C so we have a which sounds a lot better than just I mean better is relative obviously but half diminished chords are use as passing chords you can connect any two chords even if it's not in the key right like let's just say I'm gonna go from like a C major seven into like a D minor seven I'm kind of skipping this note right here right so let's say I'm going back and forth so it's a different type of tension it's not something that resolves on the one but you can always use it in passing so I just threw that - 7 flat 5 chord on the note in between and I can just added something a little bit different right now this is going to take us to our third type of diminished chord which is a diminished 7th chord otherwise known as a full diminished chord now this is actually pretty interesting chord and this also comes from stacking intervals so the first tribe we did we stacked minor thirds on top of each other that gave us three notes a triad now this is going to be a 7th course there's gonna be four notes but all stacked in minor thirds so let's play this on just one string the open E string right so if we start with the E and do a minor third we go three frets higher to a G go a minor third from there three frets higher B flat or a sharp three frets another minor third from here C sharp or D flat now go another minor third from here and we end up right we started on an E so the interesting thing about this is there's only twelve notes in music and if you go three notes at a time you'll start with one note three notes three notes three notes you're back to where you started so the interesting thing about diminished 7th chords is that one chord voicing could actually be four different chords because if you keep circularly going through minor thirds where you started is really kind of inconsequential right it'll make more sense in a second so let's learn a voicing for a diminished seventh chord and since we already know that a string voicing of a minor 7 flat 5 chord it's really easy you just take that voicing and you move it down one string so I have my pointer finger on the D string to my ring finger on the g string three my middle finger on the B string two and my pinky on the high E string three now I can perceive any one of these four notes as being my root note because as I cycle through they're just gonna that you can look at them as inversions because they're all the same chord okay so if I move this down three frets one two three I'm getting the same four notes that I did here just in a different order so is the first a minute seven I'm gonna move it up a minor third from I can think of it as like the second fret to the fifth fret 2 2 5 8 11 and then I go back another minor third go up another minor third and I end up an octave higher than where I started so it's a really unique chord because you can just kind of cycle through the inversions and the same chord can have four different names and it's just how you're perceiving the root note now this actual stacking of intervals and again let's just look at a real quick arpeggio right if we were just to take anything right if we took like like a D and we wanted to make it D diminished seventh we could just stack minor thirds on top of each other so it's right here go to here mmm so one two three four and the next time I would go up one or third I'd end up back on adeno right so it's a good way to kind of connect a note to each other now no individual major scale key has all these same four notes in them so it creates a really kind of just just more tension really now another interesting way to look at that is its relationship to the dominant seven chord so stay with me here right if you take any kind of down in a seven chord like let's just take the a string voicing of that D right so a d7 if you drop the the root note or actually raise it if you raise it a half step you get a diminished seven so the way I kind of like to look at diminished sevens is I'll take a chord I'm already very familiar with right like a d7 you might even know this voicing where the open D string is our root note if we just raise that a half-step a semi tone we'd end up with that voice and we just learned so I kind of like to see diminished 7th chords as just an alteration of a dominant 7th chord and what you can do there is you can use that in different chord progressions so let's just take something like a like a d7 to an E minor 7 to an a and then back to a d right now I can easily alter this d7 to make it a diminished 7th chord by just raising that root port so it's a very jazzy type thing to do I'm starting with a d7 I'm raising the root which now this is my new roofer diminished 7th chord so I can look at this as like a D sharp diminished 7 e flat diminished 7 so the 7t flat finish 7 e minor 7 to an a back to the d there's a lot of different things you can do so on top of this voicing that we did for a diminished 7 we also have another one in the a string where you can just think of a voicing you may already be familiar with a dominant 7 voicing with a raised and root note right so it ends up looking just like this anyways you can really feel free to plug these into any spot the the cool thing about diminished chords is they kind of sound unstable right they sound a little strange because it's almost like you're going out of the key even if you're staying in that in the key so it's a really great thing to do to kind of just experiment throw it on any root note see how it sounds and then kind of search for the resolution because there are kind of different types of resolution that you can achieve depending on the chord progression in question so just learned a couple voicings and then just throw them on different root notes and kinda you'll really develop an ear for how you want diminished courses on whether they're triads whether they're minor seven flat five chords whether they're full diminished diminished 7th chords and it's kind of experiment with them and your own ears are going to kind of make these different connections and really once you know about handed the construction of the diminished chords you'll start seeing them more in all types of music not just jazz and even just kind of like pieces of it like that like the relation between a root and a flat five like right now again the arpeggio remember for the diminished ride was an A and C in E flat you just kind of take pieces of like first take the flat five relationship and then take the third to the flat five which is just a minor third and there's really no limit to what you can do with diminished chords but now that you know how they're constructed a couple of different ways in which you can use them hopefully we can start getting this diminished chord self-esteem back up to where it belongs and it have it be a very easy to use and well-executed addition to anybody's chord vocabulary

Channel: Sean Daniel

Views: 331,113

Keywords: guitar diminished chords, diminished guitar, half-diminished, what are diminished chords, how to play diminished on guitar, flat 5 guitar, sean daniel, youtube guitar chord lesson, guitar theory lesson, guitar chord theory, youtube guitar vid

Id: zA8pVC_tPt8

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Mon May 30 2016