You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Does That Work? Diminished Chords

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

Today, Adam is all up on diminished chords as he continues his solo series How Does That Work?Like those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Manus, and you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Coming at you for day two of my solo week here at the piano. Peters in Europe, I'm here in St. Louis, but I'm at the Steinway piano. And this week I'm doing a sort of basic jazz theory series here called, how does that work? You know, like yesterday was altered dominance. Today I want to be talking about diminished chords and how we often use them in jazz. There's a few different ways you can use a But first let's define what a diminished chord is. If we start on C, a diminished chord is built on minor thirds. So we have C, E flat, G flat, and A natural.

So this chord is built around, at least in jazz, most of the time, it's built around the diminished scale. For a straight up diminished chord, it's built around the whole half diminished scale. So we go in a series of whole steps, C to D, half step, D to E flat, and then so on, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step. step, whole step. So E flat, F, F sharp, G sharp, A, B, C. So if you skip a note, right, you get this C Diminished 7. Okay, so how do we use Diminished chords in jazz? Now, diminished chords are often

used as a substitute for a seventh chord. It can be, say here we have our C diminished 7. This could be acting as a five chord to D-flat major. Here this all the time. right from the half step below the dimension or it could be going to b flat minor essentially these are used as part of a dominant seventh chord it can really be used as a dominant seventh flat nine remember all altered extensions from yesterday from any root note a half step below any of the the notes in the seventh chord so wherever you would use a b-ceton 7 flat 9, like say to E major, you could use one of these four, because it's symmetrical, diminished chorus. So C or A. That's kind of how they function. But mostly they go from

the half step below. You might see them use there. They're also used to substitute a tonic chord. So if I'm landing on C, you see this all the time where you would use a C diminished to delay going into the C major 6.9. You know, happens on tunes like, let's get lost and what's new. You hear people do this all the time. So that's another way you can use that diminished chord. And then the final way is, or a final way we'll talk about today, is again, as another passing tone, but this time from, instead of from below as a seventh chord, from above. So if we have a 3625, again, you can sub out, instead of A7, you can do E flat, diminish 7 to the D minor 7. So three, and instead of six, E flat, diminish 7, two, five, one.

see this all the time, especially on that three-six sub. And you see it too, from the two up to the three. This is a sound you hear a lot of in jazz. It's how we use these diminished chords. So we have an option is to use it from below, from above, like in the 3625, and then as a substitute for the one. That's so beautiful. So how do we build voicings on diminished chords?

The way I've been playing them so far is really kind of icky, right? It's what you hear a lot of beginners play. Like they'll just do straight up and they might even double it, which is gross. So we noticed from our scale, our whole half, that we actually have four other notes in this octatonic scale. And all of those notes are in play. And they're all one whole step above our C diminished here of C, E, flat, G, and A. And so at any time, we can take any of these notes in our voicing, if we're going to voice out a chord. and sub it out with the note a whole step above.

So even here, the C diminished 7, I can, instead of playing A, add that B, and it sounds great. But it works with any of them. It adds just a little bit of a clash there, you know? Any notes from this diminished chord that you move up one whole step sound great. And for pianists, when we're doing two-handed voicings,

we can get some really lovely voicings out of this just by using the other notes in the other notes in the scale. scale. It's called a double diminished, right? So here I have C, A, and E flat in my left hand, and that's from our original C diminished chord. And then I'm borrowing notes from those other four notes in the scale. A, flat, B, and F. I could put D in there too. Here's all of the notes, double diminished. Fully double diminished. All the notes from the octatonic scale. And it sounds awesome. So if we're doing our, again, our 3625, we're with subbing that E flat diminished for the A7,

we can do that exact voicing. How great is that? Again, E flat C, G flat, and then from the other scale, B, D, F, A, flat. I love that so much, that sounds so good. So that's just a very basic primer of how we use diminished chords. and scales in jazz.

There's a whole other philosophy of the diminished scale with dominant chords, the half hole. We briefly touched upon yesterday, but that's a whole other kind of worms. This is really just the pure diminished, you know, the very basics behind it and how we use it. So that's it.

I'll be back tomorrow for some chord subs. How does that work? But until then, you'll hear it.