Diminishing Returns

A year and a half ago I was telling someone how unimportant diminshed chords were for music. Indeed, in Rock music, people very seldomly use diminshed chords. Today, you could have a very profitable career in music and never use a diminished chord.

Now I know better.

In classical music, diminshed chords are among the most useful chords I know. And this past year has been my experimenting with them to the point of exhaustion.

A chord is simply the sounding of notes simultaneously. A major chord has gaps between the notes. A minor chord has a different configuration of gaps (Skipped notes) between the played notes. And a diminshed chord has yet a different configuration of gaps between the sounded notes. These configurations set the mood of a section of music.

Mood means a lot.

From my perspective mood and melody are the pillars of good music. Ignore either and the roof falls in.

So, as I said, I have been exploring how to use these chords to create music that is rich in mood and flavors. The chords or harmony of the piece provide the platform upon which the melody can be built. Crummy platform, crummy melody.

The delight that stems from diminished voicings (chords) is that they can be used all over the place. here is a link to a study I wrote this morning to demonstrate the wholesale use of diminished voicings. The piece is in the key of C major. The diminished chords are all very similar and all include the notes B, F, D, & Ab:

http://www.dreamscience.net/RocuroEtude1.mp3

Every 2nd or 3rd chord is a diminished chord, though I fragmented the chords a bit to create melody.

The diminished chords open up the possibilities of the piece in that they add coloration. I look at that as "surface area". The more surface area to the piece, the more directions I can spin-off.

Now, a simpler and more measured use of the diminished chords is to replace the V chord. If the song is in the key of C , the fifth chord (V) would be a G. At the end of a passage it is common to signal to the listener that we are wrapping up that section by playing a little turn-around of I V I, in the key of C that would be C G C. The G can be replaced by a B diminished chord to add more flavor.

This is illustrated in the second clip:

http://www.dreamscience.net/RocuroEtude2.mp3

This clip is the same passage ending either with a IVI turn-around or a I viidim I turn-around. Fun, huh?

Its gets more exciting when you hold that diminished chord before returning to the root chord (C) and play a bass or contrabass climb through the 4 notes that make up the diminshed chord.

Now I know better.

Rocuro