Diminished Chords - How to Use Them on the Guitar (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=405 Here's a transcript of the video: The formula for the diminished seventh chord is 1 b3 b5 bb7. If we apply this to the key of C Major …we get the notes …C Eb G and B double flat. As working with double flats quickly becomes confusing, I’m going to call that note by its enharmonic equivalent of A. Now, if we take a close look at these notes C Eb Gb and A - we spot something interesting - they are all three semitones apart. Now take a look at what happens if we extend this series of notes. If we go up three semitones from A we come back to the note C Up three semitones from there would of course take us back to Eb, then Gb, then A again and so on… This shows us that the diminished chord belongs to an elite group of chord types that are symmetrical - that is to say that their notes are equally spaced relative to the chromatic scale.. This has a number of practical applications some of which we will explore in this series of videos. The application I want to draw to your attention in this mini lesson stems from the fact that any note in a diminished seventh chord may be considered to be a root note. Each of these four chords, C diminished, Eb diminished, Gb diminished and A diminished contains the same four notes. Because of this, they can generally be considered interchangeable when harmonising a given melody.This takes us back to the end of the last lesson where we were playing this sequence… Which, although it just about worked, left me feeling uneasy, particularly with the change from Gdim7 to Cdim7. Whenever you feel a little uncomfortable with the choice of a diminished chord in a sequence, it is always worth trying the other inversions of the same chord - in other words, the three diminished chords that share the same group of notes. So, instead of C dim 7 lets try Eb dim 7… not sure that’s much of an improvement. What about Gb dim 7 …hear how that smooths out the bass line…now lets try A dim 7 that seems to flow better as well. But what if I want to keep the C dim 7th and alter the G dim 7 chord instead? Here’s our G Major scale…We apply the diminished formula 1 b3 b5 bb7 and that gives us the notes G Bb Db and Fb. We’ll call the Fb by its more commonly used enharmonic equivalent of E So let’s try diminished chords based on each of those notes in place of the Gdim7. This is how it sounded with G dim 7. Here it is with Bb dim7 instead Let’s try Db dim 7… …that makes a nice chromatic bass line to the C. Finally let’s see how the E dim 7 works… again, too lumpy to be of much use really. So there’s a useful trick to learn when working with diminished seventh chords that exploits this unusual property of symmetry that they have. In the next lesson we’ll look at how we can use this symmetrical property when we are improvising over diminished chords. If you found this little video interesting, please click on the ‘Like’ button if there is one, 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 website and take a free look round at what’s available there. See you again soon!