Jambole.com – for Guitarists

I’m going to group together and cover Diminished, Minor 7 flat 5 and Diminished 7 Chords in this article.

Let’s start with the Diminished Triad. These are built from a root, a flat 3rd and a flat 5th.

Drawing out the intervals I have…

This particular chord is rarely used, you’re much more likely to see the Min7b5 or the Dim7.

Here’s a handful of guitar fingerings for the Diminished chord. The root note is identified in black.

Minor 7 Flat 5 Chords

Min7b5 chords are basically a Diminished triad with the addition of a flat 7th. Drawing out these intervals we have.

This is much more ” especially in Minor Jazz harmonies.

Here are some standard guitar fingerings for the m7b5 chord.

Diminished 7th Chords

Interestingly the “Diminished 7th” name was reserved for a slightly different chord than the above.

People noticed that if you double flatten the 7th (in other words use the 6th instead) you end up with a symmetric shape where every tone is a minor 3rd away from the next.

Drawing these intervals out we have.

This has the interesting property of every note of the chord being a root note. In other words each of the chord shapes below are 4 different Diminished 7th shapes, depending on which note you decide is the root.

Here are a handful of Diminished 7th guitar chord charts. (roots in black as usual ;o) )