Building Diminished Chords on Guitar

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. We're now going to take a look at another type of not-so-common chord but depending on the type of music you're playing, you might find it. It's called the diminished chord. We start again like building our normal triad. We start with our 1, our C. We're going to hop over and we actually begin building this one like we would a minor chord. We take our flat 3, just like we would in a minor, so in this case we now have an E flat, and we actually do the same thing when we get over to our 5. We give ourselves a flat 5 also, G flat. So in the case of C, a C diminished, would be the note C, E flat, and G flat or if you're in any other key, you can just think of the numbers 1, flat 3, flat 5. The symbol for a diminished chord would look like this. We've got our letter name or a chord name, in this case it's C, and then we just add a little circle here up at the top and that tells us that we're basically going to be doing that flat 5 there. You might even see sometimes, especially in jazz, they'll actually just put a little minus sign and the 5 or a flat sign and the 5. And it's just telling us to do the same thing and be like a C minor with the flat 5. So, and again, since we haven't heard this one, it's not as common. Playing it in a key might sound something like this, here it would be. These are just major chords here we're playing, and then we might bring in diminished chord, it's a little bit more tense, and then we can come back home. It adds a little bit of tension and it's a little bit more unique sound. It gives us a little bit of more variety to use with our music. So, that is the diminished chord: 1, flat 3 and flat 5.

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