How Many TYPES of DIMINISHED CHORDS Are There?
Why are there so many different types of diminished chords? Diminished triads, half diminished, fully diminished...
Three whole types of chords? That's unacceptable, and an unwarranted cognitive burden posed on the already overstretched minds of innocent musicians!
How can a person possibly be expected to remember the difference between three different things? That is significantly too many.
Well, I’ll tell you how: by applying - frankly - the absolute bare minimum level of effort into learning about it!
Yes, I'm not asking for a lot of effort here: like I said just the bare minimum will serve you just fine. To prove my point: there is exactly one note different between all of these chords.
Remember which note is different, and you’re golden.
If you have an iota of mental energy to spare on learning about diminished chords, head to the link below and I’ll explain the difference between these chords in a hair under six minutes.
P.S. the midwit reaction is: "Six whole minutes?", followed by being offended by this P.S. ;-)
Want to learn more about chords, diminished or otherwise? Check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course if you want to fully understand chords and harmony on the guitar.
Video Transcription
Hello internet, so nice to see you! I have a very interesting question on diminished chords. Diminished triad might be referring to a half diminished seventh instead of a fully diminished seventh.
Be careful, be nice and explain the difference. Also, the diminished triad has three notes while the fully diminished seventh has four notes. Okay, there is something right and something wrong in this comment.
Okay, whenever we talk about diminished, and by the way, I know that I'm Italian and I mispronounce this and I say diminish. But, of course, it's diminished... Okay, so sorry about the pronunciation.
I may forget to say this last part. Okay, it's just not in my pronunciation. But diminished... When we use diminished and we refer about chords, there are four things we can mean. And it's important to know the difference so you know which one to play.
So, first of all, we have the diminished triad. Triad, as the name implies, has three notes. Okay, so the diminished, and I'm gonna write D -I -M, okay, because I don't want to write the full word every time.
Triad, okay. If I play a diminished triad with a root of B, I'll have the notes B, which is the root, D, which is the minor third, F, which is the diminished fifth. The diminished triad, so it would be B, D and F.
It's this. Okay, played a bit higher so people can hear it better. B, D, F. That's the triad, three notes. But then, that's not the only diminished chord you can have. You have the fully, the diminished seventh...
Seventh, also called the fully diminished chord. The fully diminished chord, or diminished... diminished 7th contains also the diminished 7th of the chord, which is in this case an A flat. B, D, F, A flat.
The A note will be the minor 7th, the diminished 7th is a half step below the minor 7th, so it's an A flat. So when you say diminished 7th chord or fully diminished, we mean those 4 notes here. Now playing those 4 notes in order on the guitar it's quite hard because I don't have this...
Well, I have this finger span but... Why? Okay, so usually you just turn and don't surround any play it this way instead. Okay, then we have the half diminished Again, that's a full diminished, that's a half diminished.
Sometimes this is also called the minor seventh flat five. Now you guys know I made a video on the difference between this and that. I think it's a distinction but it's not important right now, the notes are the same. The notes of those are B, D, F and A, meaning the root, the minor third, the diminished fifth and the minor seventh. Okay, and so that's the third entity. So we're gonna have those notes here. Again, they're not in the same order.
So I could do B, D, F, A and that's a half diminished as opposed to the fully diminished. That's the difference, okay? And again, if I play them here, the difference is the A or A flat note I'm playing in there.
But then there is another entity. Which is the diminished chord. And here is where people get confused, because people use diminished chord to indicate this or to indicate this. But that's the diminished seventh and that's a diminished triad.
Diminished chord is a different thing. A diminished chord is any of the above. It's not one specific chord, it's any one of those three. That's a normal thing to do, okay? Doing to say something chord and to indicate, not one specific chord, but to indicate indicating a family of chords, okay?
For instance, in jazz, whenever you say that there is a major chord, you can mean the major triad. So like, I don't know, C, E, G, like a C major. But you can mean the major triad with the sixth, so C, E, G and A.
You can mean the major triad with the major seventh. So the major seventh chord, C, E, G, B. Or you can mean the major nine chord, the C, E. G, B, D, and so on and so forth, and many other. The idea that when you say, you just say major chord, not major triad, major chord, you are meaning any of that.
It's left to the player to choose the one that sounds best to them, but all of them will be legit. The same happens for minor chords, the same happens for dominant chords, those are families of chords, not one single chord, okay?
And so the problem with the original comment that I'm answering today is that they were confusing diminished triad with diminished chord, okay? Which is an important thing to have. So now we've explained what are all those diminished chord, okay?
Which one is the triad, which one is the fully diminished, which one is the half of diminished, and what diminished chord actually means, and you can go back to the original video and see the rest of the video.
Thank you very much, this is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com, and until next time, enjoy!