Diminished Chords Made Easy
You may have already heard about diminished chords, you may have already tried them, but chances are that you could not find a good use for them! This is because the diminished chords have to be used with special care due to their particular sound. In this lesson I will show you how diminished chords are built, and one possible and easy way to work them into your own chord progressions. Let’s start.
How Diminished Chords are Built
The diminished chord (Let’s say, C diminished) is built by taking his root note (C), then taking the note 3 frets higher (Eb), the note 3 frets higher than that (Gb), and another note 3 fret higher than the last one (A). Note that if we co 3 frets higher than the last note (A) we find again the root of the chord (C). So, the C diminished chord is made by FOUR notes: C, Eb, Gb, A.
The C diminished chord is often notated as: C∘
Let’s see some common shapes for the C diminished chord (the first two shapes are the most used):
The Symmetry of the Diminished Chord
When building a diminished chord we are always taking the next note 3 frets higher than the previous one, as explained above. If you think about it for a moment this means that the C diminished chord, the Eb diminished chord, the Gb diminished chord and the A diminished chord have all the same notes inside, just arranged differently.
Another useful property of the diminished chord is that all the shapes that we have seen above can be moved up or down by 3 frets, and they still have the same notes inside (i.e. they are the same chord). For instance, all the following shapes are a C diminished chord:
This is very useful when working in practice, since any shape you will memorize will be four times more useful! In practice, to make sure you are playing a C diminished chord, you just need to check that there is one C note inside the diminished shape you are playing. If there is a C, it’s a C diminished chord; if no C is included, then it’s not a C diminished chord.
Spicing up a chord progression
Let’s take an easy chord progression: Am C Dm E. It’s a very simple chord progression and it sounds good already, but let’s see how better it can be with a couple of the right diminished chords!
So, here is a simple rule to use diminished chord: just before a chord, use the diminished chord whose root is one semitone (one fret) lower than the “target” chord. Let’s work it out for our example. The second chord in our chord progression is C. The diminished chord whose root is a semitone (a fret) lower is B diminished. This means that instead of playing Am, C, we will play Am, Bdim, C. We can now do the same for the next chord (Dm): the diminished chord whose root is one semitone lower is C#dim. And we can do it again for E: the diminished chord whose root is one semitone lower is D#dim. Our chord progression now becomes: Am, Bdim, C, C#dim, Dm, D#dim, E. We can play it this way (click HERE to hear it):
In the last bar we have repeated the E chord twice (in different positions) to keep the momentum of the chord progression going.
Diminished Arpeggios
The diminished chord can be used also in arpeggios. The first thing you have to learn is this shape (that can be used whole or in part):
And then you can use it following the same guidelines we indicated before. For instance, the same chord progression we worked on before can be played this way (click HERE to hear it):
Of course here we are barely scratching the surface on what you can do with diminished chords. There are way more things you can do with them when you learn how they work in a guitar chord progression: you can use them to create more tension, you can use them to alter other chords, you can use them to change key... the list is very long! Click below to learn more about diminished chords and how to use them:
