Diminished Chords - How to Improvise Over Them - Part 2


Published on 26 January 2016
If you would like to gain full access to all our Guitar Teaching Materials please visit the Secret Guitar Teacher Site and take a free tour: http://www.secretguitarteacher.com/youtube/ssb.php?lp_id=402 Here's the video transcript: In the last Sound Bite we saw how the Diminished Seventh Arpeggio is entirely composed of minor third intervals all notes spaced exactly three semitones apart. Here's a look at how I might use this knowledge to improvise over a dim7 chord appearing in a typical Blues or Jazz tune. Over this tune I can happily rely on the C major scale or C major blues scale as a general safety net for my improvising. But if I want to highlight the diminished seventh chord that follows the F at the start of the second line. It helps if I quickly check the notes that make up this chord F# A C Eb So, supposing I'm jamming along like this just using the C Major scales over the changes...Then as the second line starts I simply target any one of those four notes from the F#dim7 chord ...we'll choose this C note in this case ... and as I happen to have arrived there on my pinky, I'll simply play straight down my pattern of minor thirds ... By following the pattern I don't even need to know the names of the notes. But if we freeze that a moment and replay it..We see that I played C A F# Eb C A and F#... all the notes from our F# dim7 arpeggio..Try it again...this time I'm working away down the bottom of the scale pattern. so I find it's this Eb that I target with my first finger and I am playing the pattern of minor thirds ascending this time and linking back into the C Major pattern as we come to the sixth bar... Once again, I simply follow one of the patterns we went over in the last Soundbite... and as long as my starting point is one of our four F#dim7 arpeggio notes ...then the others will be too. Eb F# A C Eb F#... OK, let's try that out over the backing track to give our ears a better idea of how that works I'll post the link for that Backing Track, together with the printout of the chord sequence under the video for you to spend some time experimenting with that yourself. In the next lesson we'll look at extending the arpeggio for the dim7 chord into a scale using an old Jazzers trick. If you found this little video useful, please click on the ‘Like’ button if there is one, or leave a comment, and do feel free to share the video with your friends. And if you’d like to gain full access to all our guitar teaching materials please visit the Secret Guitar Teacher Site, and take a free look round at what's available there. See you again soon!