Unlock the Potential of Diminished Vocabulary feat. Vincent Herring
- Jazz Lesson Videos
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Most players hit a point in their journey where they start to wonder “what’s the deal with diminished chords?” Major chords and minor chords are pretty straightforward to use. But diminished chords are tense, and you don’t hear about songs in the key of B diminished (although you might in B Locrian, but we’ll save that for another day!)
Today we’re going to share some of the diminished concepts that Vincent uses to spice up his playing. This language is based on the diminished scale, which is composed of four triads — we’ll be manipulating those triads and rearranging them to give different colors for your sound.
Everything that we talk about you can find in Vincent’s resource with Jazz Lesson Videos, Diminished Mastery. In it, we look at various ways we can break down the diminished scale and use it to enhance your solos, as well as providing context in etudes and phrases over standard chord progressions. And of course, if you want to see how Vincent plays through any of what we talk about, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, Unlock the Potential of Diminished Vocabulary feat. Vincent Herring.
Now let’s get playing!
Contents
The diminished scale
The first thing we’ll dive into is how to play a diminished scale. We’re going half step, whole step, half step, whole step, half step, whole step.
Then you also have what's called an altered scale, which is going to be a different formula. The way Vincent thinks of an altered scale is as a mode of Lydian Dominant.
When he was a kid studying with David Peterson, he learned Lydian Dominant, which is just what it sounds like — 1, 2, 3, #4, 5, 6, b7. In the key of C, it's going to be C, D, F#, G, A, Bb. If we start on the tritone of the Lydian Dominant (or the F# in C) we get an altered scale.
So starting on the F#, G, A, Bb, C, D, E, F#. The altered scale gives us access to so many of the altered tones you hear, like b9, b5, #5, and more.
Diminished triads
Part of vocabulary building with a diminished scale is breaking it down into triads. There are four triads in a diminished scale. When you take those four triads and start manipulating them and pairing them together, you get some really interesting phrases and cool sounds. One of the first sounds that we do is what Vincent calls a “tritone scale.” And for this he takes C major and F# major and fuses those two chords together to make a scale. And notably the notes of the C tritone scale would be the same as the F# tritone scale.
The ways you can manipulate these tritone scales are endless.
There is a phrase Vincent used to hear Joe Henderson play a lot. He used to do that phrase a lot, which is a triad and a b9.
It gives you a lot of character without stepping outside of the chords, although it does sound kind of inside-out.
You can also mix and match, it doesn’t have to be one and the tritone.
You have all of these different colors that you can use.
And the best way to get a feel for this is to strike the chord at the piano and play the combination against it, just to hear it and hear how it is connected
Diminished etude
Now let’s look at one of the etudes from the resource, this one is over “Caravan.”
The opening in the etude is inspired by triads with flat nines. You can take that phrase and steal it — make it personal. Vincent recommends anytime you're learning anything, take it, understand the concept, and then make it personal. So you may want to arrange it differently, but learn it the way it is, in place, and then progress from there. Here's an interesting pattern.
This is all based off the triads. And those triads can be fit into the diminished scale.
One of the reasons why we use Caravan to describe what we're doing is because it's nice and isolated, but you can take these same concepts and use them on conventional songs.
So where we have this straight diminished in Caravan, we can look at the same thing with those triads.
We’re doing the same diminished concept. When you learn it here over Caravan, you can build your vocabulary and then start manipulating it and using other colors.
Major ii-V
Next up, we’ll look at major ii-V progressions and how we can use diminished material inside of them.
In this first major line, it’s nothing fancy, it’s really just straight diminished, and a typical way of coloring these chords.
There are ways you can do this that fit really well—the great thing about the diminished scale is this tension/release and tension/release constantly.
On this example, when we led from the V to the I, we had a really smooth resolution that you can hear really clear.
Minor iiº-V
Last, we’re going to check out some minor ii-Vs from the resource.
So again, with the minor, we’re just coloring that first chord, and then we’re free on the next chord before resolving.
We have a manipulation of that V chord with the diminished content that gives it such a strong harmonic tension and release on the resolution.
Again, the best thing you can do is export these ideas and concepts into other things that you're working on. By learning these ideas in an isolated setting like we have here, you can get to know how they feel and how they move. Then you can take them out into the real world to try on anything you like.
Before we go, we’ll look at a line from another etude, which is based on “Woody ‘N’ You.”
Thanks for checking in—hope this helps give you some new diminished concepts to work with. If you want to see how Vincent played through any of these examples, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, Unlock the Potential of Diminished Vocabulary feat. Vincent Herring, as well as our resource Diminished Mastery.
We’ll see you next time!