You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The Diminished Scale - What the Hell Is It?

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

It's another edition of our series "What the Hell Is It?" Today, Peter and Adam break down the diminished scale - what it sounds like, how to play it, and when to use it.Calling all pianists - get the Piano Access Pass today! Save money with this bundle featuring every piano course ever from Open Studio, including teachers such as Peter Martin, Geoffrey Keezer, and Helio Alves.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 and leave a comment for this episode.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to The You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Music Advice coming at you. Coming at you today, we are super diminished. I think we just invented a new scale. Have we ever done a musical banter before that? Was that the first time? That was the very first one.

We're so excited to be in the new Pod Suite with the Flying V keyboards here. So we can have a little musical conversation every now and then. That's nice. The diminished scale really lends itself to musical conversation. It's all open-ended. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, don't diminish the value of the diminished scale. I would never.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you do, you're going to find diminishing returns for sure. So we're talking about the diminished scale because we want to know what the hell is it? Yeah, what the hell is the main scale? This is part of our series. You know what? What the hell is that? And I'm an expert in this because for many years, not intuitively, I knew could play and could hear a diminished scale, yet I didn't know what the hell it was.

So maybe did I know what the hell it was? I don't know, but I didn't know how the hell to talk about it. But now I've come full circle. I got my first melodica when I was like 20 years old or something. And I used to really not knowing much about the diminus scale at that time, but I used to play it on the melodica and like pretend it was Tuts Tielman. You know, Tuts? Because to me it was like, oh, it sounds so much like jazz on a melodica.

It sounds like I would just be like, I'm Tuts, you know, like walking around. And I mean, look, this is this scale is allegedly legal in the classical world. in several other worlds. They don't know anything about that. Yeah, but it's weird, like, you know, classical musicians kind of, they don't really, do they know the scale? Like, the logic. They don't really know about it.

All right, well, let's talk about what the hell it is first. Yeah, so there's a couple of ways that you can use the diminished scale. The first way and the- Wait, I thought we're talking about what the hell it is, not the, not the, how the hell do we use it? Oh, okay, sorry, it's an octatonic scale. It's an eight-dote scale, right?

Okay. And it's a... What is octetone? Oh, eight-notes. I just, I know. I demonstrated what it was. So, but to get even further, so it's a very symmetrical scale. The way that we're going to start by talking about it is what we call the half-hold diminish scale. And the reason why it's called that is because it's a series of half steps and then whole steps.

And then it just repeats that pattern until it goes back to the start. So if we're starting in C, it's C, D-flat, E-natural, F-sharp, G, A, B-flat, C. and the eight-note part of the scale one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and then the ninth is you're repeating the octave. Right, and so if we were then to start this on D flat, it's not, it's not that. That would be a whole half.

Right. It's a whole different scale. Same intervals. Right. Half note or half step, whole step, half step, whole step, until it repeats. And then it does it one more time with D. Yep. Right.

And then that's, it. Because once it gets to E flat, it's the same pattern as it was in C. It's in fact the same notes. It's the same. Exactly the same notes. And so if you take the keys that we're in here, it creates a diminished chord. If you skip a note, now we have this diminished seventh chord. But do not diminish the value of that. F, sharp, A, right? So the sound is the most important part. And it sounds very ambiguous. It sounds like it's not on solid ground this chord. It is not. It is transitional. It's the part of your story when you're leading to something else, but you've got some choices, but you want to kind of leave a little bit of suspension with the audience. I mean,

like this is the actual usage of it, but this is also the sound of the thing. That's right. That's why I used to old school, like 70s television, be a lot of people. Right. You know, like going to the commercial break, that was unresolved. It was unresolved. It's got that sound built into it. The chord and the scale even more so, because you've got all those different possibilities that are within that half hole diminished. So in improvised music, we use the diminished scale as a system of tension. And we do this most often actually not on a diminished chord, but most often we do this on a dominant seven chord.

With alteration. That's exactly what we were doing in the intro. We were doing a C-7, flat-9, sharp-11. I think I played this voicing, C-E-F-sharp, B-flat. I don't know what you were playing, but it's really a C-7-13, because the A-natural is in there, with a sharp 11 and a flat 9 sharp 9. Yeah.

So that doesn't really matter. That sounds more complicated than what it actually is. If you know this scale, you can use this. So say if we're going to F, and we have what is commonly referred to as a 251 cadence, right, over this C7, right, we can use that to resolve down the F. It sounds like a great.

It's almost like a bunch of like leading toes. Exactly. It's a series of. leading tones, as a matter of fact. Like, it's endless the uses of the scale as a tension builder to release later. And that's all built into the scale. So when you, and that's even just playing it as a scale. Which is how we almost never play it.

Exactly. That's the funny thing about it. So now we know what it is. And just to kind of reiterate that there's three of these, I think, you know, this is something that's not, it's commonly understood, but you have to really think about how you're going to apply this to your playing and to your learning and really, internalizing the scale to have success with it. There are literally just three of these scales

that you need to learn. And by learn, I mean if you're a pianist really getting them to your hands, if you're a trumpet, getting the finger, you know, for your particular instrument to really know them. But you want to be able to hear when it starts to repeat. So the C half hole, you want to think about hearing it that same diminished pattern or diminished fully diminished chord. So that when you start

here, you're hearing that same because it is a symmetrical octatonic type of scale. that you're hearing those same intervals as you move through that on the micro and the macro level. And one thing that unlocked this for me on dominant seventh chords, and I've since shared this with some of our open studio students, and they were very enthusiastic about a light bulb moment for them, is you can think about this.

In jazz, we have what's called the tritone substitution, right? So if I have a C-7 chord, you can substitute that with the seven chord from a tritone away, in this case, G-flat, right? Which is like a half-step movement to our right. our F chord, right? So I like to think about this as sometimes as a C-7 going down and then a G-flat-7 going down.

Right? So it's like the top half of a C-7 and the top half of its tritone sub G-flat-7. I like it. That, to me, growing up with tritone subs, just unlocked how easy this could be. Well, and that's the magic of, an eight-node scale compared to all the seven-note scales that we learn

and all the modes of the major scale is how this can interplay with rhythm because you've got two, three, four, one, two, three, four, and then you're right there, whereas if you're doing, even like an altar scale, which would kind of work good, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, and now you're already into the next octave, you know. And it's fine, but it's just a different kind of usage. So, and the thing I like to do with that, and I love that,

I used to kind of hear it like that. I never thought about it. And when you mention it, that C-7, F-sharp 7, that really started to make sense in terms of the construction of dominant scales and how they apply to this half-hole because that's really the function of what we're using it over that kind of chord,

so it makes sense. Exactly, right. And that way you can use it for any tritone sub. Like it works on the F-sharp 7 or G-flat-7 just as well as it does on C-7. Yeah, and another cool thing about that going through, so if you think about the C-7, F-sharp 7, you can also think about...

Right. All the way. So C7, E flat 7, F sharp. Yep. A. We're playing the same. Exactly. Hey, great minds think alike.

That's right. Yeah, yeah. But, and then these are kind of the most basic ways we're doing it. The actual function of it, well, the usage of it is a lot of time. Same kind of cluster of notes. Right. And we love to look at clusters on the piano. Right.

But how are you going to mix it? Make a shape and turn into some music instead of just a scale. So now you're getting into the real advantage of the diminished scale. And that's shapes. Because it's symmetrical. What the hell is. the real advantage of a diminished scale. The hell it is, it's these symmetrical shapes. Because this scale is broken up into four equal parts essentially, there's four different, if you find a shape

that fits those notes, you can take it up or down in minor thirds and it'll work. Like, I think on our intro, I was playing something that I love to play over this, which is like, it's like a major and minor triad, right? So here I have an A, major triad and minor triad. Right, so I have C-sharp C-A-E. It's four note set like we were doing before, which is nice. I can move this then down in minor third. So here's the A. Now F sharp, which is A sharp, A natural F sharp C.

Then E flat. Yep. And then C itself. Like those four note shapes are so easily moved around. And then as always that you were starting to play around with this, you know, just change up the order, then you're going to get into some places so you're not just running from top to bottom.

It's endless. Like you can do, like whatever. Yeah. Like whatever you want to make of those shapes. But I think as pianists especially, the shape thing can unlock this. Because once you sort of get that, in that mode of minor thirds,

you find these shapes that work in the scale and you can literally just start practicing, transposing them up and down in minor thirds. And just to show how much the rhythm matters, these are, you know, these are all kind of examples of four note, two plus two, four note, rhythmic things that would be 16th note, eighth notes, whatever. When you start to play with three note, whether it's triplets or still layered over the eight notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Broken fists. Yeah.

And combining them and stuff, the diminished scale really shines there too as well, especially over this half hole. But today we're really talking about, we're giving them extra because we're talking about what. the hell is it. We already showed what the hell it is. This is how the hell to use it. But we should also talk about what I always thought was the only diminished scale, which is the whole half, right? Is that still a diminished scale? Oh, it certainly is. Some people are dogmatic. Like, that's the real diminished scale. So over C, it would be very different sound. Yeah, but it's really, it's the same pattern. It's just starting it in a different place, right? So it's a whole, whole step, half step. You're going to get actually the same three scales, the same notes of the same three scales.

It's a matter of thinking about it in a different way. Yeah, if you think about like a D, like a B dominant. Right. It's a, it's a. That's the C. Yeah. It's either a B half hole or a C whole half. Yeah.

Or a D half hole. Or anything else within that. So many others. Yeah. But this is commonly used. Like, I think of whole halves on, the only time I think of them is on actual diminished chords. Fully diminished.

Fully diminished. Fully diminished. or with a major seven, anything in that area. Like, yeah, that's really, and... And really, like, I think the time that I really am sort of conscious of using this in a way that it's like, oh, I'm using the notes of that scale as opposed to applying that half hole in a different way would be like, you know, on a ballad.

Well, it didn't have to be a ballad, but... So like F minor, 7 to B, flat, 7. And then we're going to go to E flat, but we go to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I try not to do the exact scale. because that's corny, but, you know, totally. Totally.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good. But it's also really, I mean, look at that. That's all within that whole half, but it's, you know, kind of hearing it off of that, like, B,

well, it could be anywhere in the diminished, but I'm hearing it as like a B-7-sharp, sharp-9. Right, right, right. And then resolving to the E-flat major. That's awesome. Well, if you want to get in on this series of what the hell is,

it, you know, let us know what you... What the hell do you want to know? It's aggressive, been kind of passive also. We've opened up Pandora's Box with the hell. Well, we had a lot of good response from your What the Hell series. Because it started out where the hell is Peter, and then you're doing them on your own, and you came with what the hell. Yeah, so give us a like and subscribe here on YouTube, if you're watching on YouTube.

We're on the YouTube. We're twice a week coming to you, officially now from the new Pod Suite on the YouTube. So look out for that. We've got a bunch of new great videos. like and subscribe all that good stuff. And leave us a rating review or comment. Should I give them an example? I mean, we don't want to put words in their mouth, but

this was a recent one. Yeah, go ahead. This is from Ezekiel Peterson, from Chile. We got fans around the world, yo. I hear this podcast every morning on my way to work. The advice they provide is excellent, and the great majority of the episodes are both

informative and fun. Oh, yeah. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. We're going to give a shout out for every rating and review that's given. So if you want to get a shot on the show, give us a rating review on Apple Podcasts.

It's going to get out of hand. You know that right. It's going to get out of hand. But you know what? We're committed. All right. Until tomorrow. You'll hear it.