Tag Archives: diminshed seventh chords

The Best Piano Exercises (Part 3) – Broken Seventh Chords

Welcome back to our ongoing series of piano exercises. These are meant to be quick techniques you can practice with just a few minutes each day to help develop your strength. The first part in the series dealt with a Broken Triad Exercise and the second was Practicing Major Scales with C Major Fingering. This week we will be covering Broken Seventh Chords.

As long as you know all your seventh chords, you can play them in all keys as arpeggios. Why would you just play major and minor triads as arpeggios? Not only is this is a wonderful way to develop your technique but when you come across broken seventh chords in your music you will already know how to approach them.

The order I play them is:

– Major seventh chord
– Dominant seventh chord
– Minor seventh chord
– Half diminished seventh chord
– Diminished seventh chord

Why this particular order? If you play them this way, there is only one note that has to change between chords. Simply keep playing the chords one by one and go through all twelve of the keys. The video included with this article will show you a great example of this.

Here is the key on how to transition from chord to chord:

– Major seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Dominant seventh chord: Lower the 3rd a half-step
– Minor seventh chord: Lower the 5th a half-step
– Half diminished seventh chord: Lower the 7th a half-step
– Diminished seventh chord: That’s it!

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com

Diminished 7th Chord – Part 2 – The Deceptive Dimished 7th

Welcome back to my two-part series on Diminished 7th Chords. Last week we talked about What a Diminished 7th Chord is and today we’re going to get a bit more in-depth about how and why the diminished 7th chord can be deceptive.

Last week we talked about how you can’t really invert a diminished 7thchord because it’s all minor thirds. There are however three ways to resolve these chords.

The first way to resolve a diminished 7th chord is to resolve it upward by a half step. So a B diminished 7th chord would resolve to C major or minor.

The next way to resolve diminished 7th chords is rather fascinating. If you lower any note in a diminished 7th chord by a half step and you will get a dominant 7th chord which can resolve in its usual manner from V7 to I. In C major, a G7 would resolve to a C major triad.

This might seem overwhelming but this is what makes the diminished 7thchord so deceptive yet so intriguing. It’s a wonderful chord and tool to use for improvisation and it’s one indicator of where a piece is going and the structure behind it.

The last way to resolve a diminished 7th chord is truly deceptive. You can take any note of a diminished 7th chord and make it the root of a major or minor triad. Try this out and you will be amazed a the unexpected sound!

This is a complex lesson and it would be a good idea to watch this video and try out the different resolutions so you can hear them. To recap: You can’t invert a diminished 7th chord because it’s all minor thirds even when inverting. There are three ways to resolve a diminished 7th chord. These chords are incredibly useful tools for many musical applications and it’s a great idea to get familiar with them and how they work. Once you understand the concepts behind them you will find it easier to understand them when you encounter them in your music.

Thanks again for joining me Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com. If you have any further questions please feel free to ask and I look forward to bringing you more of these videos.

What is a Diminished 7th Chord? – Part 1

You’ve no doubt heard diminished 7th chords before. Anytime you hear spooky chords in an old horror movie or a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, works of Richard Wagner, as well as many other pieces of music, they are pervasive. They serve very important functions. But what are diminished 7th chords?

If you aren’t familiar with music theory or if you haven’t watched my past video: Explaining Musical Intervals – Whole Steps and Half Steps, I would suggest starting there. As a refresher, a half step is two keys together with no keys between and a whole step is two keys together with one key between. If this sounds confusing it would be a good idea to watch the video linked above.

A diminished 7th chord is built on minor thirds, so it’s one-half step bigger than a whole step (a step and a half, or 3 half-steps). Just as there is only one Chromatic scale and two Whole Tone scales, there are only three possible diminished 7th chords. After that, they are all just inversions – starting on different notes of the same chord.

When you build a diminished 7th chord you start with a note and count 3 half-steps to each successive note. After building 4 notes this way, if you build one more you will be back to your starting note! You will soon discover that unlike all other 7th chords, you can’t really invert a diminished 7th chord – it would still be a diminished 7th chord – all minor 3rds. So there are only three possible diminished 7th chords.

The great thing is that diminished 7th chords can go almost anywhere. They are incredibly useful in modulating to other keys and they can be used in improvisation as well. Next week we will be going much more in-depth with these chords and explaining practical uses for them.

Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin Robert@LivingPianos.com.