Transitional Chords Part 1 | Diminished 7th Chords

One of the fundamental four chords that beginners learn are diminished chords. Diminished chords don't typically stand on their own.  They're transitional chords but they can add a lot to any chord progression.

If you really want to add flavor to any chord progression, diminished 7th chords have a sound that you just can't ignore.

We're going to use a gospel chord progression to showcase the diminished chords in today's article. This is actually going to be a two part article because I want to showcase a couple of different types of transitional chords so we'll start with diminished 7th chords in part 1.

Diminished chords are a rather easy concept to understand. If you have an understanding of Major and minor chords, it should a simple for you.

Major chords consist of the root, third and fifth. Here's C Major for our example.

If you lower the third down a half step, (to the minor third) you have C minor.

To create C diminished, you lower the 5th down a half step and now you have C diminished triad.

You can create a diminished triad out of any Major chord just by lowering the 3rd and 5th a half step.

Let's go a step further and create a diminished 7th chord from this simple diminished triad. But first, let's define how the diminished 7th tone plays a role in a diminished chord.

If you're familiar with 7ths, you're aware that there are two different types of them. There's the dominant 7th and Major 7th tone. Again, we'll use C as our example.However, there's actually a third 7th tone when it's in the context of a diminished chord.

Again, if I have the basic diminished triad and I wish to extend this quality, I can actually achieve this by adding the diminished 7th tone. All I must do is find my dominant 7th (or flat 7th) tone...

...and lower it down a half step.

But wait, how can this note be the diminished 7th when it's actually referred to as the 6th?Good question. It's commonly known as the 6th, but when you add it to a diminished triad, it takes on a different context. It's the diminished 7th tone. This is the only time in which it's referred to as a diminished 7th instead of the 6th.

There's also something very unique about diminished 7th chords. They're perfectly symmetrical. In other words, every tone that they're made up of is the exact distance from each other. This is the distance of a minor 3rd. You could say that they consist of a stack of minor 3rds. And it doesn't matter how you invert the chord, the intervals will remain the same.

C diminished 7 root positionC diminished 7 First InversionC diminished 7 Second Inversion

C diminished 7 Third InversionThere's also another unique aspect of diminished 7th chords that this symmetry creates. This is, if you invert a diminished 7th chord, you simply have another diminished 7th chord that can be based on any of the tones that it consist of.

For example:
Because of this symmetry, there's actually only three diminished 7th chords when you factor in that any of the tones can be inverted to create a new diminished chord.

Now that we've defined diminished 7th chords, what are some ways in which they're used to make music more interesting? As I stated before, they're most commonly used as transitional chords. These can also be defined as passing chords.

In our gospel progression example, we're going to use the key of E flat to showcase our diminished 7th chords. This is in keeping with the fact that the key of E flat is a very common key used in gospel music.

To start out with, our gospel chord progression will consist of the following:

Key of E flat 1-6-2-5-1 Progression

The 1 ChordNow let's add in some diminished 7th chords. Moving from our 1 chord, we don't have to go directly to the 6th. We can walk down chromatically down to it.

On our 7 chord, we'll play it as a diminished 7th.
Continuing on to the flat 7 chord, we'll play that as a diminished 7th chord as well.

We can play the 6 chord as we would normally would as a minor 7th chord.

We're going to add one more diminished 7th chord in our gospel progression.  But before we do, it would be tasteful to add in an altered chord on the 2 chord in our progression.

It would be common to play some type of minor chord on the 2nd, but let's take it a step further by altering some of the tones and playing an altered chord. In this case we'll play a F 7 sharp 9 sharp 5 chord.

Your basic F dominant 7 chord consist of the root, 3rd, 5th and dominant 7th.
Adding the 9th makes it an F9 chord.

If you raise the 9th and the 5th this creates a 7 sharp 5 sharp 9 chord. (Voicing created  for the smoothest transition)

Notice that this chord has a dissonant quality to it and how it transitions nicely to the next diminished 7th chord.

Just before arriving to the 5 chord, we'll play the flat 5 chord as a diminished 7 chord just before it. In our gospel example, this will be A diminished 7th.

This smoothly leads us into our 5 chord in which we'll create a suspended quality to it by voicing it as follows: