Diminished chords... have you ever heard of them? They're the chords guitar players try to avoid and hope no one noticed they didn't play!
Seriously, diminished chords are a mystery to most players, they sound as if they would be difficult to get both your head and fingers around and even if you could play them where on earth would you ever use them?
Actually diminished chords are easy to play and applying them to your guitar playing and can be very useful in creating strong, unique chord progressions.
There's three common types of diminished chords; diminished (triadic - three note chord), half-diminished (also know as the minor seventh flat five chord) and diminished seventh chords (scaletone seventh - four note chord); today I will be referring to and focusing on the diminished seventh chord; it's a versatile, distinctive sounding chord that works well in a variety of musical settings.
Here is a easy way to play the diminished seventh chord on the guitar.
--2---
--1---
--2---
--1---
--x---
--x---
Firstly, you can see that's it's not that difficult to play, all the notes are close to each other and there's no nasty finger stretches.
Secondly, the diminished seventh chord can be identified by any of the notes under your fingers, in other words this one chord shape can have four (actually six) different names.
We could call our chord by the following names...
F# or Gb, C, A, D# or Eb diminished
Let's move our chord shape up one fret to create the following chords...
--3---
--2---
--3---
--2---
--x---
--x---
G, C# or Db, A# or Bb, E
Already you know twelve diminished seventh chords that's not a bad effort using only one chord shape!
Onwards and upwards, moving our chord shape up one more fret to create another five chords.
--4---
--3---
--4---
--3---
--x---
--x---
G# or Ab, D, B, F
Now here's the really interesting part, if I move this chord shape up another fret I end up with the exact same set of chords as I started with...
F# or Gb, C, A, D# or Eb diminished
--5---
--4---
--5---
--4---
--x---
--x---
The only difference would be the notes would occur on different strings than the first chord shape, the second chord would be a different inversion of the original chord.
So that's another interesting feature about diminished chords they repeat every three frets, so you could play the same shape and continue moving it up or down the fingerboard at a distance of three frets at a time and still be playing the same chord; that's a great idea for creating movement in your music without
actually changing chords.
Try playing the following introductions using our new chord.
Key of C
C / C#dim | Dm / G / ||
Key of G
G / G#dim | Am / D / ||
Key of D
D / D#dim | Em / A / ||
Experiment with these new sounds and ideas and a whole new exciting world will open for you on the guitar.
And now I'd like to invite you to get free access to my "How To Remember 1,000 Songs" eCourse. You can download the course for free at: http://www.guitarcoaching.com
You'll learn about hit song templates, easy chords, simple scales, red hot rhythms, and successful practice strategies in text, audio and video.
From Mike Hayes - The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar System
