How to Play the Half Diminished Seven Chord in Jazz Guitar

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com. I'm a professional guitar instructor and today we are going to be studying beginning jazz guitar. Next I would like to discuss what is referred to sometimes as the half diminished 7 chord or the minor 7 flat 5 chord. This chord as the name implies minor 7 flat 5. Is a minor 7 chord with the 5th also flatted. What I have here for example if I was to base it off of this A minor 7 right here with the root on the 6th string right. Basically all we have to do is look for our 5th and flat. If we have a minor 7 chord now, we have to find our 5th flatted. There is no real good way of doing off this chord so that is why I started with this one. Root, flatted 7, flatted 3, our 5th. Take that note and flat it. Create for a little more difficult of the fingering but what I am going to do is use my middle finger here, mute out the A string with it as well; flatted 7, flatted 3rd and flatted 5th. Minor 7 flat 5 or half diminished chord. That same chord played off the 5th string. Here's my minor 7 chord. I've got a root 5th so it's flatted, flatted 7, flatted 3rd and this 5th here which I can't flat and I don't need to. I've already got another 5th in here flatted. I've got my root and my flatted 3rd, my flatted 7th and my flatted 5th, so I don't really need another 5th. What I will do I will switch these two fingers around just for comfort. I am using just the middle 4 strings here. I've got my root flatted 5th, flatted 7 and flatted 3rd. I'm barring the root and flatted 7th here but you also see a lot of good players playing like this using 4 different fingers. I think either way is perfectly acceptable and works fine. "