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Diminished Chords - How to Improvise Over Them on Guitar

2,820 views · Published 24 August 2015 · 6:15 · Indexed 26 October 2026

Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher · 2015 · Music

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Here's the Video Transcript:

It's often the case when learning guitar that the things that sound the most complicated in theory, turn out to be the things that are easiest to apply. And improvising over diminished chords is definitely something that falls right into this category. Sometimes hard on the brain - but thankfully, easy on the fingers!

In this lesson we'll take a closer look at how to play diminished seventh arpeggios. As we looked at a couple of lessons ago, the diminished seventh chord is one of a select group of chords whose notes are arranged in perfect symmetry. Here's a quick recap of what this means: Here's our C Major scale. To create a C dim7 chord we need the notes 1 b3 b5 bb7 from this scale.

First note C, then take the third note E and flatten it to Eb, the 5th note G and flatten it to Gb and the 7th note B and flatten it twice to B double flat, a note we more commonly call simply A.
 
So C dim7 comprises the notes C Eb Gb and A. If we now look at where these notes are on the chromatic scale, we discover that each note in the chord is exactly 3 semitones apart and that this arrangement effectively goes on indefinitely.

Now there are three useful ways to find this interval of three semitones on the fretboard. We can play it straight up one string...which works on any pair of adjacent strings except of course between the third and second strings where we only need to move down 1 fret .

Here are some useful patterns we can make using this information. Especially if you have long fingers, you might like the simplicity of this backward diagonal pattern. For more everyday use: One octave forward diagonals off the E string... or A string... One octave forward diagonal off the D string - much loved of sweep-picking fans. Backward diagonal works quite well off this string too. We can combine these ideas to make two-octave arpeggios off E string... A string...  or D string... And we can play a three octave pattern off the E string like this...That's quite a few ideas to be going on with so I'll include a printout with this video as a reminder.

So, spend a few days practicing those ideas and next lesson I'll demonstrate how we can throw those in to the middle of an improvised solo.

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