(jazz guitar)
- Hi everybody, my name is Jens Larsen.
In this video,
I'm going to show you how you can play a diminished chord,
and give you a few different voicings for that.
Then I'm also gonna talk about
how you're gonna find some extensions,
and add those to the chords,
because the diminished chords
can be a little bit mysterious,
and can be difficult to really figure out
what notes to add and what notes not to add.
In that process,
you'll also see how I think about extensions,
how I work out what extensions I can use on a chord.
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The type of diminished chord
that I wanna talk about in this video
is the kind that you're gonna find
on the flat three of a major scale.
So I'm not gonna go into the theory, really.
I wanna focus more
on just how to play them with chord voicings,
and also how to add some extensions,
and get a little bit of freedom
when you're comping with these chord voicings.
(plays guitar)
This is in the key of F major,
and the first chord is just a third degree so A minor 7.
Then we get the flat three diminished,
which is the A-flat diminished,
and then G minor 7, which is a two,
and then the five,
and then back to the one, which is F major 7.
So there are a few ways
you can play a diminished chord like this.
This drop 3 voicing is one that's really useful.
Of course, with any diminished chord,
diminished chords are symmetrical,
so you can actually move them around in minor thirds,
and then you're gonna play, essentially the same chord.
So I could go over these as well.
The thing with the drop 3 voicing is that
when you play it like this,
then the lowest note kinda wants to be the root, very often,
at least if you play as low as this,
so there you're not gonna be using the inversions that much,
but this is a good way of playing it.
You can do the same on the next string set,
so that would be an octave higher, like this
and of course you can move those around as well.
Another good one is to use a drop 2 voicing.
That would be this one,
which, of course, also can be moved around.
The drop 2 voicings
are used as rootless voicings a little bit more often,
so they're more likely to be voicings that you move around.
Of course, once you can play the basic voicing,
like this or like this,
then you wanna start looking at,
how can I make some variations on it?
How can I add some other notes, and some melody,
and in that way make it a little bit more interesting.
To do this, we need to place the voicing in a scale,
because we're already in the key of F major.
If we look at an F major scale, then that would be this,
and really, what I wanna do is just alter this F major scale
so that I can fit the diminished chord in there.
So if I look at this voicing,
I have an A-flat, which is not in F major.
The F is in F major.
B is not in F major, and D is in F major.
So I need to change two notes in my F major scale
to fit this chord in there,
and there are two ways you can do this.
So the first one is the one which is gonna give us the scale
that I use the most for this.
We have the F,
and then I'm gonna change the G into a G-sharp.
Then the A is gonna stay the same.
The B-flat is gonna be changed into a B,
and then C, D, and E can stay the same.
So now I have this scale,
(plays guitar)
and if I play this from A,
(plays guitar)
then I have A harmonic minor.
So that's a scale I already know,
and that's actually the scale
that's gonna fit on this chord.
Now that we have a scale
that's sort of the context that the chord is in,
it's actually not that difficult
to look at what we have available as extensions.
Just start by taking the notes out that are the chord tones,
so that would be, in this case, G-sharp,
and of course I changed the A-flat into a G-sharp
because that fits with the scale,
but it's the same note in this context,
so G-sharp, B, D, and then F,
and what I'm left with is then an A minor triad,
so A, C, and E.
So those are the notes that I can pick from
when I wanna have some extensions
on top of my diminished chord.
The thing is just that with this scale, then the C,
if I had to add a C on top of my diminished chord here,
then I'm gonna get this interval in there,
and that's maybe not really what I'm looking for.
So that doesn't work that well.
The same goes for the
for the A.
So really,
there's only one note here I can add as an extension,
and that's the E.
(plays guitar)
If I just take this chord,
and then look at what I can reach,
then I'd have my basic chord, and then I can add the E,
and I can also stretch up and have the F in here,
but already, with my one extension here,
I can actually already do quite a lot
in my first example of the chord progression.
So I could turn that into this.
(plays guitar)
So here, I'm using different melody notes on all the chords,
and you always wanna see what different notes
you can fit on top of any chord, that's gonna fit with
of course, they have to fit with the chord itself,
and then they also have to fit
with the scale that they're in,
so that you play something that really makes sense
in the piece of music that you're playing,
which, in this case,
is just a chord progression in the key of F major.
So that's also what I'm going here.
So A minor shell voicing,
and then I'm moving up with the melody,
which actually makes it like a drop 3 voicing,
and then the 11,
then the diminished chord with the flat six here,
down to the basic diminished chord,
then G minor shell voicing,
this short movement with a G minor drop 2 voicing,
C7 flat 9, bass note,
then the seventh as a melody note,
and then resolving that to F major 7.
So if you wanna add this E,
or a flat six to the different diminished voicings,
for the first one,
it's really just changing this D into an E.
For the one that I had up here,
it gets a little bit more complicated,
and it's a little bit less practical, because the D is here,
and we're gonna change that into an E here,
and then we have this one, which sounds really cool,
but it's not that easy to use.
Another one that's really useful here is
if we start looking at the drop 2 voicings,
and then on the top string set, and then here,
thinking more sort of from a rootless perspective,
where we don't actually have the A-flat in the root,
in the bass,
then we get this one,
which is sort of a really practical voicing as well.
So in this case, we only have one extension available
for our diminished chord,
but actually,
if we look at another scale choice for the diminished chord,
then we can sort of access one more.
It's gonna be a little bit further away, in terms of sound,
and also, I don't think you're really gonna
maybe I can think of one standard
where you can find this in the melody,
so it is, in that respect, a little bit further away.
The idea here is that if we try to find another scale
for our A-flat diminished,
then starting with the F major scale
(plays guitar)
just one octave here, or not even, up to the seventh,
and then I need to fit my A-flat diminished here,
and instead of
so we start on the F, go to G,
and then instead of the A, I'm gonna use A-flat,
and instead of the B-flat, I'm gonna use a B,
and then C, D, and E are the same.
So now I have this scale,
(plays guitar)
and this scale, if I play it from C, is
(plays guitar)
C harmonic major,
and this scale will fit
this diminished chord,
and it has another note that we can use as an extension,
because it has a G.
So if we do the same as I did
with the A harmonic minor scale,
and just split it up into the chord tones
of the diminished chord, so A-flat, B, D, and F,
and then what's left,
which in this case is in a C major triad, so C, E, and G.
Then now I have E,
which works as a nice extension,
and I also have a G, which works really well as well.
Of course, there are several ways
that you can add the G to the chord voicings.
So if we take this A-flat diminished chord voicing,
I can use the G instead of the F,
and then I have this, which is really just a G major triad
over an A-flat bass note,
and if we take the drop 2 voicing up here,
then that would be this,
which is, again, just A-flat bass note, G major triad,
and you kinda wanna check that out for this version of it,
which is really the same voicing,
just on another string set, so you have this voicing.
If I use these diminished voicings
when I'm playing through my progression,
then that sounds like this.
(plays guitar)
So as you can tell here, I'm playing sort of two voicings.
I'm not really playing the root,
even though I'm starting with an A minor
that does actually have the root as the lowest note.
So the first is just A minor, adding an 11 on top,
then we get, for this A-flat diminished,
we get first this voicing, where we have the G in there,
and then the one with the E on top,
then a G minor 9, and then a C7 flat 9,
which is actually also a diminished voicing,
and then back to this A minor voicing
that's here working also as an F major 9 voicing.
A version of the progression
where I'm using the lower drop 3 voicings,
could sound something like this.
(plays guitar)
So here, I'm starting with an A minor shell voicing,
then adding the D on top,
going up to the A-flat diminished,
with first the E in the melody,
and then moving that melody down to a D,
and then I'm just borrowing here,
so another way of adding the G, in this case,
is to just put it on the top string
so that we have an extra note
on top of the original drop 3 voicing here,
and moving from the G to the F,
and then down to a G minor 7,
repeating the bass note
just to keep the groove movement moving,
C7 flat 9, another bass note,
and then F major 7,
and then I'm sort of embellishing this with some harmonics,
so the idea here is that these notes,
(plays guitar)
that were like A, D, and G,
work really well with the F as an F6/9,
and I'm also adding the 7th, which is the E here.
As you can tell, I'm not a huge fan
of using the diminished scale on diminished chords,
which may sound strange.
In fact, I find that the diminished scale
is sort of a mathematical, or a systematic construction,
so it doesn't actually belong in sort of a tonal song,
where we have, in this case,
a cadence that's clearly in the key of F major,
and it doesn't really fit.
There's always gonna be a few notes
that are not gonna sound that great in there.
So then it makes more sense to just start with the key,
and then alter the notes of that scale
into something that we can use,
and then you're gonna have something
that's gonna fit a little bit better
with the context that we're playing.
It does kind of make sense, also,
if you look at what notes are used in the melody
over diminished chords,
if you're checking out standards,
that usually
they're not really coming out of the diminished scale
at all, and it is, maybe,
something that's a little bit overlooked
in this whole discussion with diminished chords,
because we say diminished chord,
and then immediately we think
that we have to use diminished scale,
and that's maybe not entirely true,
but let me know what you think,
and also let me know what you do with diminished chords,
and how you work with them,
and of course, if you have a great idea for some extensions,
or some voicings that work really well,
then leave comment on that as well.
Usually, there's really a lot happening,
in terms of useful information,
in the comments of my videos,
and it's actually a place where I also learn quite a lot.
So if you have something to share,
then please leave a comment.
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