Hey Friend,

You received a bunch of exercises yesterday for the B Diminished triad, the second chord in the A minor key. As I've been playing around with all these chords, I get to noticing little things here and there that keep it interesting.

For instance, in both major and minor keys, the diminished chord always follows a minor chord and is followed by a major chord. I've said it before, diminished triads don't sound very pretty on their own.

But put them within the context of another chord or a progression and things change - they earn a bit of respect by helping transition between chords and making interesting platforms for the melody to ride on top of.

So diminished chords definitely have their place in the harmonic scales - the natural progressions for each of the keys. But how would you like to know a way to make a diminished chord sound good  within the setting of a song?

I figured out a very cool progression...

I found myself playing an open A chord earlier this week as I was putting together one of the daily messages. Since I was laying out the A minor key for y'all, I guess I just gravitated towards all things "A." 

I knew we would be rolling up to B diminished next, and I just happened to play an open A major and then a B diminished. The B° triad is very easy to play if you just use the open D shape on the fourth, third and second strings at the third fret.

I thought, "Wow, that's a cool sound!" So I started working with that combination to see what would come of it. Turns out, using a harmonic minor scale seems to work really well with forming up a melody. 

Using a bunch of chords from the key of A major also works nicely - we're just substituting B° for the B minor that we'd normally find in the key. C#m, F#m, D and E work play very nicely with the A to B° progression. 

So all I did was change the Bm chord to a B° to completely change the feel.

Technically speaking, you could consider this an altered IIm chord from the major key. We only changed one note on the B minor chord - the fifth. By lowering the five note in the chord, it becomes a diminished triad.

Another direction I looked into is playing three major chords in a row then the B° chord. You don't see three consecutive major chords in a key, so this creates a different mood.

I was playing F, G, and then A as the root chord everything revolved around. The actual progression is A, B°, F, G, A. In this case, the progression is from either the A minor or the C major key, depending on how you work out a melody. The A chord just happens to be the altered chord here (an altered Im).

Change Am to A and you've got the little riff I've been talking about.

In both these instances, only one chord changed, and the change was only one note in the chord, but the differences take the riff from "meh" to "hey, that's cool!"

I know, just when you thought there were rules keeping order with the various keys, I throw this funkiness at you. Goes to show you how flexible music is - you don't have to follow the rules all the time (or any of the time, if that's your thing). 

Try playing around with these keys and chords. Substitute a major triad for the minor and see what happens. 

I might be light on the daily email this weekend (again?!). Yeah, plumbing, cabinets and floors going in the new bathroom - we want to get as much done as possible. We'll play it by ear. 

Happy Friday!

Peace~

Dave