Fully Diminished Voicings - Peter Martin | 2 Minute Jazz

Are you scared of fully diminished voicings? Never fear, Peter Martin is here to give you some tips.

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What's going on everybody? Peter Martin here for Two-Minute Jazz.

We're gonna talk about fully diminished chords today. I want to give you a little bit of ideas for your voicings. So we're gonna take

"Embraceable You." E flat major. Then the second chord: G flat fully diminished. So we've got the root, minor third, minor fifth, diminished seventh. but I've always thought that was kind of a basic sound. 

So, the easiest alteration you can make is: shift that diminished seventh up to a major seventh. Okay so we know we still got that diminished triad but with the major seventh, which kind of leads nicely to where we're going. And so this to me it always kind of implied that D7#9 kind of a sound. Right? But the root's going up to G flat. And in terms of like implementing this in some two-handed voicing, we've got E flat major and what about this? What do we have here? We've got the G flat - the root, the diminished fifth, we've still got the diminished seventh and up here we have the major seventh. This is the minor third and like this, I really think about, this is that D mino triad and if we put the D down - the root,

Then we go half hold diminished. Thinking about it off of the D. Okay? You can kind of move this around chromatically. Have some fun with it there. And it leads real nice to where we're going in F minor. Okay? So we don't need to be scared of the fully

diminished. I know sometimes it feels like we're locked in and it's so basic. But you know there's some nice symmetry here too and I always love these voicings where you've got the tritone separating the hands. I don't know why. It's always been like a cool thing to me there.

Works off of either root. And when you take, you know, when you have this voicing in your arsenal, a nice thing too is you can go basic. Root position first and then kind of jump up here and combine it. It'll give it a little bit of a modern sound. Alright?

So don't be afraid of the diminished, and have fun with the diminished.

Happy Practicing.

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