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Topic: Diminished tuning? |
Andrew Goulet
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Posted 4 Sep 2020 5:33 pm |
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| Just an idle question for a Friday night: does anyone play a diminished tuning? I've been experimenting with diminished chords and I like their melody possibilities. Maybe use the pedals to bring it into a major chord? Just spitballing here. |
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Pete Burak
From:
Portland, OR USA
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Scott Denniston
From:
Hahns Peak, Colorado, USA
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Posted 4 Sep 2020 6:22 pm
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| Very interesting concept. I studied part of a guitar course by Pat Martino where he looks at the diminished as kind of the central chord from which all other chords spring. Kind of like most of us see the major chord and move the third down a half step for a minor etc.. He sees the diminished as the root chord. It's been a while and I can't remember which of his courses that was but it made a lot of sense to me and I meant to get back to it. Too late for me to approach steel that way but I think it's a viable concept. |
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Bill McCloskey
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Posted 4 Sep 2020 6:31 pm
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| Diminished chords are used as a great way to modulate to a different key. Four keys share a single diminished chord which helps to modulate to any of the other three shared keys. |
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Andrew Frost
From:
Toronto, Ontario
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Posted 4 Sep 2020 10:08 pm
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A lot of tunings have stacked min3rds on adjacent strings as part of a dom7 tuning. (3/5/b7)
For example B11 has D#/F#/A but it would indeed be interesting to have a continuous series of min3rd intervals. |
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Brett Lanier
From:
Madison, TN
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Posted 5 Sep 2020 6:01 am
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| Scott Denniston wrote: |
| I studied part of a guitar course by Pat Martino where he looks at the diminished as kind of the central chord from which all other chords spring. Kind of like most of us see the major chord and move the third down a half step for a minor etc.. He sees the diminished as the root chord. |
It's been a while, but the way I remember it he converts everything to its relative minor, usually dorian. |
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Scott Denniston
From:
Hahns Peak, Colorado, USA
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Posted 5 Sep 2020 9:56 am
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Yes in his "Linear Expressions" he uses what is actually Dorian mode (though he never refers to modes much) for soloing. Example: He'd play a Gm riff over a C7 chord which of course is the V chord in Fmaj and the Gm would be Dorian. Then when using subs it really gets interesting. But in his course (I think it's called "Complete Guitar") his organization of chords all begins with altering the diminished chord.
I think what Andrew was referring to here would be to actually tune the pedal steel open to a diminished chord and use the pedals to alter that into different chords. Intriguing thought but a little much for my brain. |
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Andrew Frost
From:
Toronto, Ontario
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Posted 5 Sep 2020 10:28 am
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Pat Martino is a beautiful player. I caught him at the Blue Note in new york not too long ago. Organ trio.
I shook his hand and told him his duo work with Gil Goldstein was some of my favourite recorded music. He looked puzzled. I know he suffered from severe amnesia at one point in his life, and had to essentially relearn everything, but I don't know the details.
I love his melodic approach. That Dorian angle makes alot of sense to me. Not sure I can really see a diminished chord as a useful starting point for everything though, but I suppose the essence of that would be the min3 as a key building block for all harmonic applications. Interesting. |
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Brett Lanier
From:
Madison, TN
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Posted 5 Sep 2020 10:51 am
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That's interesting, Scott. A quick search and I found a whole lesson series by Pat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGZRFEa6g88
On the topic of steel guitar, the C6/A7 lap steel tuning that Jerry Byrd and Joaquin Murphy sometimes used is in a way a diminished tuning. I've been using the 6,5,2 (w/ 2 lowered) voicing more for E9. It can be a pretty sneaky way of grabbing a diminished chord. And since my second string is already tuned to D, I guess it's in the tuning. |
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Fred Treece
From:
California, USA
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Posted 5 Sep 2020 12:26 pm
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In standard E9, you are most of the way there to B-D-F-G#dim7.
Open strings 10-9-6-5-3 are all chord tones of a straight diminished chord.
With E’s raised a half step, strings 8 & 4 are added to form a full 4-tone dim7.
Retune D# to D (like Brett said), or hit it with a lever (leaving string 9 unchanged)
The F# strings are be the oddballs, but I would leave them.
You could experiment with that configuration as your starting point and work backward and forward to see what trouble it gets you into. |
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Andrew Goulet
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Posted 6 Sep 2020 7:25 am
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Thank you for all the thoughts! Diminished chords are so interesting. Sometimes I feel the the only scale I really use is the chromatic scale  |
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