I bet this one is a bit off the beaten path for you! Unless you’re into jazz, not too many guitar players plumb the depths of the diminished chords, but today I wanted to show you a fairly simple way to string some into a lick.
The amazing beauty of this diminished 7th chord shape is that you can move it around the fretboard, in steps of a minor third (that’s three frets), and every time you do, it becomes another inversion of itself!
Effectively, this means you can string a bunch of these together and you’re always playing the same chord, but it gives a very nice ascending or descending feel because the pitch of the chord changes each time you go up or down the neck.
Because we’re in the key of C major or A minor, we’re using a B dim7 chord. Bdim is the VII chord in the key of C major. As you can hear in the video, it resolves beautifully to the A minor.
Try playing around with this! One idea is to use only two strings from these shapes, and create a double stop style riff from them. Try all the different pairings to see how they sound!
If you liked this lesson, you can find a lot more on the Lick of the Week page!