You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 4 Tips to Make Your Diminished Chords Sound HIP

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

Too often, diminished chords are played without any flavor or variety. Today, Peter and Adam let you know how you can put a stop to it by integrating these tips into your playing.Social distancing might mean going to concerts is out of the question, but Open Studio is still keeping the live music going! Peter is performing solo piano every Friday evening at 8:00 PM EDT on YouTube (you'll be able to check out his performance tomorrow night right here). And today, watch this AMA with Open Studio's own Gregory Hutchinson with this link.In light of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, we understand that money is tight for a lot of people right now. That's why we've decided that for the duration of this crisis, we'll be running a Choose What You Pay campaign at Open Studio. Choose whichever course you want and then let us know how much you're willing to pay - that's it. For more info, click this link.Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Adam. Yes. Okay, well, maybe... What about? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Oh, yeah, I got one more. Yeah, one more. Diminishing.

I'm Adam Annas. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear a podcast. Daily Music Advice coming at you. Coming at you today. sheltering from home, but we are podcasting. We both have our good cameras. And we recorded a video yesterday. I don't even know if it's going to make it to the YouTube's Pete, because, you know, I was using the laptop cam. But now I got the good old Canon, what is it, CM-2850.

I don't even know what this is, but it's a really good camera. It's M-50. It took 18 weeks to deliver to my house. Luckily. It just feels like that. You're losing track like everybody. We're losing track of the of the days of the week. It's Tuesday and I'm Peter. Yeah, that's right. Is it? Tuesday? It is Tuesday.

Holy cow. Yeah, so we're still sheltering from home, but we are still getting loads of questions. And we're actually, man, we're working harder than ever here at Open Studio. Sheltering at home is hard, man. The sheltering part is the easiest, man. It's the working while you're sheltering and raising kids. I feel very sheltered, but. Also, I think today, you know, there might be some diminishing return.

on this what? Hello? Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, we are going to be talking about diminished chords today. Yes. And we're going to give you four tips to make your diminished chords sound hip. Yeah, you know what? Go ahead. Now I was going to say first, we were just going to tell you that

because we've been forgetting lately. I don't know why. That we were brought to you by Open Studio. Go to openstiojazz.com for all your shedding in home while you shelter in home. What? Yeah, we've loved interacting with all of you in the last few weeks and hearing from all of you, as we've all been kind of working on new stuff at home. And go to open studio jazz.com if you want to check out some online courses that you can improve your jazz playing,

whether that's piano or any other instrument. We got them all. But today we're talking about four tips for making your diminished chord sound hip. And this came up because we got a comment in one of our previous YouTube videos from a few weeks ago. where I think it was the one on substitutions, Peter, and you were playing that substitution of a diminished chord instead of a one major chord, you know, the kind of like, and then resolving.

Right. And someone was like, wait, is that a diminished chord? Why would you call a F minor major six, a diminished chord, whatever, because you played, basically you borrowed some other notes that weren't strictly those notes. We didn't really get into it that much, but I thought we could talk about ways, to make the diminished chord sound hip

because to my ears, when I hear like intermediate players, the minish chord is always the last thing that gets hippified. Everything sounds like they can be playing some slick ass and they get to a diminished chord and they're like, it's root position Ronald right there.

Yeah, root position Ronald. And look, everybody, when Adam says, you know, particularly, when he says things like, particularly with intermediate players, basically he means everybody except Chickory and Herbie Hancock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. me three years ago, essentially.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's kind of a, isn't it a chronic problem of the diminished chord being a root position situation? Definitely when you're beginner

and possibly even intermediate. For lack of an understanding or fear of the unknown. Right. And it's also a lack of understanding of what are the extension possibilities for a diminished chord, right? So if you don't understand

the diminished scale, then you probably don't know what notes you can add to a basic four-note diminish chord to make it sound better. And I think that's where we'll start today. We'll start with what we're calling and what a lot of people call it, the double diminished, because this will roll into the other things we'll talk about.

Okay. If we can explain why we can use two diminished chords on one diminished chord, it'll kind of go into some of the things like the triads and minor six, natural six kind of thing. So the diminished chord is based off the whole half diminished scale, right? So if we play in C, it's C, D, E, Flat, F, G, F, F, flat, A flat, A natural, B, C, right? Whole step, half step, whole step, half step.

Yeah, you got it. You got it. And so if we skip a note, we get that diminished chord. Everybody knows how to make some kind of diminish chords. It's just minor thirds. Root position ronle. Root position ron. So a lot of folks don't understand until they get a little bit more advanced

how this chord can become something like, say, this chord. Oh, me likey, be likey. Isn't that nice? And how they work together. So if we take our diminished chord based off our diminished scale, right, and we use the notes that are missing from that diminished scale, in this case, D, F, A, A, and B, that's the other notes of a diminished scale. And that's a whole other diminished chord.

Yes. those notes are the extensions that we can put on top of a diminished chord. So if we have our C diminished, any note from D diminished is fair game to put in our voicing, right? This now opens up a world of possibilities. It does. And you know what? Fun fact about PM here, speaking of myself in the third person because of the whole pandemic situation, I never knew that's what double diminished was.

I always thought double diminished was like, um, oh. like a D-flat and a C. You know what? I don't even want to say because I'm going to make myself seem ignorant. No, no, no, no. I didn't, let's move on. I didn't know what it was either.

Like a lot of things, it wasn't until I watched Jeffrey Kieser's first course, keys to Jess piano. And he was talking about, apparently Herbie had said something about the triple diminished. Herbie Hancock, of course, uses all three diminished chords. Right.

We have three hands, too. I know, yeah. He pulls from basic, which means basically the chromatic scale, he pulls voicing it out of. He basically proves that if you pull out hip stuff, you can call it whatever you want if you're Herbie because it's going to sound good anyway. That's right.

No, but thinking about this, I think like you have two options of two diminished chords with your, if we have a C diminished, right? And knowing that our extensions that we can use are anything from D diminished. Even if you just play them together, it sounds hip as hell. Yeah. And actually, I love this way of thinking about it. And if it's cool with you, I'd like to roll right into number two because now that I know that I know double diminished is, I see a little connection between it.

So number two of our four tips to make your diminished chord sound hip is to think about triads. So the way I'm seeing that is if we stay in this key of C diminished, and then your next notes, I hear that as an D minor triad, second aversion. Oh, yeah, beautiful. How beautiful is that? And you can also go up here, but this is where you start to see a little side bonus tip about diminished chords is that inversions,

especially these kind of superimposed triads and stuff, how they're inverted or not, it's very important because check this out. Same D minor triad, but just in root position,

not as hip. Now that's hip on top of each other. A little Stravinsky action. What? Where you had Igor? Well, any triad in the second inversion is always better for some reason. The second inversion is kind of the king of inversions.

Well, on this same line, one of my favorite, like, slick, you know, to the point of doing something like that sound, those four-note sort of modal sounds. One of my favorite diminished voicings is this. Right? So if this is F-diminished, it's just F with an E-triad in, of course, second inversion. Right? And you could see this as E over F, but that's also F-diminished, right? We have our root

and then we've just taken that fourth note of the diminished chord and substituted in something from the diminished chord a whole step away. No, it's great. That's great stuff. And then the other thing, and this is, we're still on kind of tip number two in terms of trias, just to give a little bit of focus to what's happening. The other way I was thinking about triads is, for instance, on, let's go up to D flat, just for a little change, right?

So we got D flat diminished. So you could think about the C triad, which takes you up to that major seventh, which is a great initial addition melodically or harmonically to getting out of that the diminished 7th. But instead of adding it to the diminished 7th, just omit the diminished 7th, the B-flat. Is that even legal?

Yeah, no, this is great. The same sort of thing as that when I was doing just a different inversion for that. Let's hear this in context a little bit. So if we're in the key of C and we're doing like a 1-625, or maybe it's like a 1, like a C major 6, and then, you know, a C-sharp diminished. Yeah.

Oh, whoa, whoa. Well, come on, intermediate. Larry. And then a 2-5, right? Yeah. Something you might hear all the time. So instead of doing this, just use one of those, like what you just did. Yep.

Yep. You know, those triads, this is a great way to think about it, actually. Just the C-triot over C-sharp. Yeah. You could even add, I like to add sometimes to this. like the B flat right? Diminished seventh and the major seventh

Yeah it sounds so great And what you start to see is Like as you move through the triad If you take the triads In the different inversions Through the diminished Cycle or circle

So then you got E flat triad And these like They're sometimes useful for voicing Like we're doing now Sometimes for melodic things Usually for both Depending on the context And that's just playing

around the E flat and the C try it. Totally, totally. And an easy way to think about this sometimes is not so much just the double diminished thing, right? So for it's C sharp thinking about the next diminished chord we would use is, of course, a whole step up, right? So if it's C sharp, it's D sharp or D flat, it's E flat. But another way to think about this is taking one of the notes from that C sharp diminished 7 and moving it up a whole step. Any of the notes. It all sounds good. That could be another way into it. So whatever your inversion is here, you know, you get that diminished sound. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. All right, number three. Okay, number three, this is, I love, I love it

when I come up with these. Number three of our four tips to make your diminished score sound hip. Play something hip, then repeat it in the diminish cycle. Up and down, minus third. I do love this, though. I do love this. But this is kind of leading in from what we were saying before, and this is like, know we're talking about chords, but I think, especially as pianists, and definitely guitarists, basically chordal instruments, I guess, you know, anything that's a great or a hip idea for a chord can be used in some way as a melodic idea, as a shape that's the foundation of the melodic idea. And a lot of times, you know, we get caught up in like, oh, well, let's do, you know, we've got to try it. No, no, don't do it like that. Don't just break up your chords.

Like, you know, really make a melodic idea out of it. Now, that all that, you know, we've got to try and let's, you know, All that was is going C, E flat, C, E flat. But I connected it in a way. So once you get the shape and the sound, that gives you a little bit of a chance to have that kind of vernacular to add it to your playing. Yeah, this works so well if you want to do any of this. Like say you have, you're playing like an A flat triad, right? Now you could do triad pairs or whatever,

but you could move this A flat triad around diminished, like around in major and minor 30s. Yeah. Ah. And then inversions of those. And it sounds. Incredible. Yeah.

And I think the trick for this number three one is to play something hip. If you don't play something hip and you just start moving around in minor thirds, it's just going to be. And then you're limp, limp-risted about it and noodled about it. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so, you know, so I mean, that's not the, oh, I'm getting a little stank face. So maybe it is a little hip. But the idea of being something simple, something riff, just moving it around.

Because, you know, melodic ideas. and riffs want to be played, you know, chromatically, diatonically. And this is kind of the version of chromaticism that works really well within diminished, moving it through minor thirds. Agreed. Number four is to lean on minor six to natural six resolution. So this was yours, and I want to hear exactly what you mean by that, because I think I know. You might know about double diminished, but I know.

I don't know. I think it's something, but I could be completely off. Well, this is like, you know, we're talking about a lot of more kind of angular, a lot of higher drama harmonic stuff, which of course the diminished lands itself, but one of the areas that we use it, like you know, where we go almost as a passing

substitution when we get to a one chord, two, five. So if we look at E flat diminish, that's the minor six, right? Yeah. Or the, yeah, minor six. Ah, sorry.

So what did I say minor six to natural six yeah so up to here that kind of thing as opposed to just sitting within that oh no there is too that makes sense it does man that sounds so great uh well this was fun i hope i hope this cleared up some things and hopefully opened up some doors to other questions that you might have and we are still here we're still sheltering from home we're doing a lot actually you have a lot actually you have live concert coming up this Friday. This is your fifth live concert. Wow.

Has it been five? I mean, that's the way I'm counting how long we've been sheltering in place. That's kind of why I started doing the concerts, basically. But yeah, this will be number five.

And I'm really having a lot of fun with it. We'll talk on a future episode just about some solo piano things. I know we have some ideas on that, but there's nothing like being thrown into having to do it every week or every night, you know, to really start to get some solo piano concepts together.

And that's Friday's. It's been awesome. We're going to do it all through April, at least. If not, May as well. We'll see what's happening then. But it's Fridays at, what is it, 8 o'clock, East Coast time, New York City time. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's been awesome, man. Me and my whole family gather around the TV and stream it to YouTube on the TV and just, like, have a night of it and get our little drinks and enjoy the show, man. And I know a lot of folks are doing the same. So thanks for putting those on. Dude, your kids are going to hate you when they grow up. They love it. it, man. They love it. They love the afterhang, too. There's always an afterhang where you're kind of

Q&A. They love that part of it. That's their favorite part. So we'll include a link to this week's shelter in place with Peter Martin here in the description. So go ahead and check that out. And until next time, you'll hear it.