Does The Diminished viiº Chord Even Exist?

mainstream academia has long held that the diatonic seven chord is diminished but what if the seven chord is hiding a deeper truth the ancient astronaut theory proposes that the seven chord as we know it may not actually even exist modern theoreticians are beginning to believe that the seven chord is not what we thought and in fact it may not even exist at all how can that be or why is that why have music teachers hidden this sacred knowledge for generation that's challenged all their predispositions and their power structure can we really believe that the seven chord actually exists we'll eventually discover it and and prove that it exists and what might happen if this controversial theory turns out to be true people will panic markets will collapse religion will collapse join us today as we explore the secrets of the seven chord if you're familiar with these seven Roman numerals and if you're anything like I was you might have a little confusion about what's going on there in that seven chord it's just a diminished triad yet we almost never see a lone diminished triad hanging out there in music and there's really not much we can do with that seven chord people don't talk about it a lot even myself I'm pretty guilty with this when I teach the seven chords of a key I often just ignore the seven chord so in this video I'd really like to open up that can of worms and talk about what's going on there what can we do with it and what are some other ways to interpret it because in my perspective the seven chord really isn't a thing so here's what I'd like to do let's keep it easy in the key of C major in the key of C major my tonic is C major and the seven chord is just a B diminished try that's the note B D and F and even if you don't know much about the seven chord and you might know that it takes us to the one chord the seven triad resolves to the one triad pretty well as a matter of fact and when something resolves to the one that means it has dominant function that's what that word means the dominant function means it just takes us back home to the one chord and you might know there there's another chord out there that has dominant function it's it's the five chord G major more specifically if you make the five chord a dominant seventh chord so like a g7 this has dominant function to take us back to C as well now let's take a look at our B diminished triad again it was the notes B D and a half right and if I just tack a G underneath that I had the notes of a g7 chord I have the notes of my my dominant chord that takes me back to C so realistically I mean these three notes are so useless on their own and we nearly never see them I can't find you any examples off the top my head of just a lone diminished triad without some reference to the fifth note of the scale which is implying a dominant chord so really when I see those three notes I'm parsing it as the five chord just the root has been missing we have concealed the root of my five chord and what we're left with is just this cluster of notes now why would I want to not call it the seven chord and instead call it the five chord well like I said I don't know much to do with the seven core I don't know what to do with that all I know is seven leads to one that's really like the only thing I know so when I think of five chords though I've got all sorts of different ideas I know how to get to a five chord I know how to go away from a five chord for example it's pretty common to do something like a one to a five to a six so now that I'm thinking of this as really a five chord let's kind of sub that in there let's do a one two a seven to a six that's a progression I really would have never thought of before right and now that I'm thinking of it as a five chord it's kind of giving me or more options also what if I wanted to get to it what if I wanted to land on this if I'm thinking of it as the five chord I could think about playing a d7 first that would be the five of five so let's say I'm in C major I could play a d7 and then I could play this B diminished back to C and once again that's the progression I wouldn't really be thinking of much if I was only parsing it as a seven because I really don't have any rules or theories or traditions of where do you throw the seven in but there's plenty of rules and traditions of what do you do with a five chord or more specifically what do you do with a five seven now you might be thinking okay that's fine you're just dealing with a diminished triad but what if you're playing like an extended chord what if you take that diminished triad and you add in the a note well now you get a D minor seven flat five or a B half diminished and yes this could once again the a7 chord but once again if we just tack and G underneath it we still get g7 but now we get g7 with an added 9 so it's just called a g9 chord once again it serves dominant function takes us back to C major and really cloud things up this chord B minor seven flat five or B half diminished these are the exact same notes as my two chord played as a minor six chord so if I play a D minor six those are the same notes as B half diminished so when I see a half diminished board I'm always trying to keep in mind that if I go up a flat third a minor third then I'll find a minor sixth chord because minor six chords are much easier to work with for me personally I have more tricks I'd have more tools I see minor chords more often than I see half diminished chords so when I see a half diminished it's helpful for me to think about its counterpart there the minor sixth chord as well and once again this helps me put it to use now that I'm thinking of this as a version of a G chord I think how do I get to a G chord well once again I could do like a secondary DOM and I could play a d7 which would take me to g7 but I'm playing it as a B half diminished and then back to C major seven so we're really hearing here we're hearing the five of five we're hearing the dominant chord with no root and then we're hearing the tonic chord two ways to parse the exact same set of chords you could think of this as the seven to the one or you could think of it as the five chord to the one and since they sound the same since they feel the same they're doing the exact same thing I think it's very very helpful to really be thinking of them in the exact same light it's just one little element as missing there and that's just the bass note that's an important note but I mean they're almost identical in what they do now what if we took that seven chord B and we made it a full diminished chord instead a diminished 7th chord well now we've introduced this note a flat and a flat snot in the C scale all right but we can still play it as a full diminished chord and we can still resolve it to C major seven to one in this context I think is like the only opportunity where seven is a real chord in my opinion like this feels like a unique thing I don't just think of this as an extension of my five point but we could think of it as an extension of my five chord if I just hack a G underneath this be full diminished then what I get is I get a g7 with a flat nine that would be an altered dominant chord it's still a dominant chord it's been altered a little bit and it still resolves us back to C but I think this is like the only instance where me personally I identify a seven diminished chord as like it's independent entity but like I said it's out of the key of C major and oddly enough even though I think of it as a unique thing there's nothing unique about it because be full diminished is the exact same notes as D full diminished same notes as f-full diminished right it's a symmetrical chord so I kind of think a seven one when we're dealing with a full diminished it's like the same thing as a two - one right same feeling same function but I am NOT just thinking of it as a 5 chord however this is just a helpful similarity to keep in mind if you take a full diminished chord and you find any note a half step below any of those tones then you will be creating a seven flat nine chord similarly if you're playing a seven flat nine chord the major third starting off that major third will create a full diminished seventh chord now this seven to one change I think is very very very helpful if you're in a minor key if I was in C minor or C harmonic minor then this seven chord this full diminished 7 is diatonic to C harmonic minor all of these notes are in C harmonic minor and once again I try to think of that as its own independent thing I really try to think of it as a seven chord or a two chord I know it gets you know you can think of it either way but I try to think of it not just as an extension of the five chord and now I can start playing with diminished as its own independent entity and it's not like I'm anti diminished I've done plenty of videos about the diminished chord on this channel and I love it I'm specifically talking about you know discrediting it in the seven position when we're in major keys and when it's just a triad there I don't think that's a practical interpretation of that chord but yet diminished is awesome there's all sorts of very useful ways to employ it and I think harmonic minor is a great example a seven to a one in harmonic minor is one of my favorite little two chord jams ever it sounds really really good also C harmonic major it's a little less common of a tonality but it does have a major tonic and a full diminished seventh or two or four or flat six that's in the key you know it's diatonic to the scale sonic sound the tonality but in that case I would think of it as it's independent chord I would think of it as its own thing and not try to associate it with some other extension so this is pretty weird stuff but I'd like to kind of really hone in on two concepts here before we close things out the first one this is this is all about context not just in music but pretty much everything in life is about context you know we can call things by two different names and sometimes that's helpful because it gives us two different perspectives and you know sometimes it's not so helpful because you know they're literally so similar that it's takes up too much brain power to try to separate them and I try to find the middle ground there I think in the case here we're really trying to look at the the you know the connections between these chords and try to expand our labeling of them so we're not just thinking of them in one context you know thinking about that seven chord is just a seven triad that has to be there kind of misses out on the usability of those three notes B D and F and you kind of always want to be cognizant of how notes can serve totally different functions just by what is on the bass or what is happening around us that takes me to my next point about diminished specifically you know I really think there's a lot to learn about just the fact that diminished chord exists and it works I mean I mean if I played you this even as an experienced musician this on its own is horrifying that's really ugly it's not good I will just flat-out say that is not a good sound yet it is given so much meaning by what is surrounded with right if I follow this up with a nice C major now that taste is gone the bad taste like you can now recognize this is a beautiful thing you can recognize that beautiful tension in there because you're aware of what that tension leads to you're aware of the the conclusion so I feel like there's a Zen lesson in there that this doesn't have much meaning on its own this is actually quite ugly and quite ambiguous and completely hard to pin down in isolation it's the things that surround it that give it meaning and I think that's another contextual lesson here that we can learn you know from music that actually applies way he passed us music you know if you try to apply that lesson that things don't have meaning on their own they have meaning by what surrounds them you know how they interact with the things around them I think it's a really important little insight that we can find here just in this simple little you know these musical patterns so I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I hope you learned something if you did please thank my awesome patreon supporters for sponsoring this channel and making these videos possible if you'd like to join them you can I've made a pretty little PDF for them about all the stuff that I taught here in this lesson and I've posted it there if you'd like to access that the link is below in the description but if you can't do that that's fine I'll like a subscription and a comment really does help me out so thanks for watching and I will plan on seeing you next time [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 99,500

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar

Id: DlQ8dkb-jCk

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020