How to Play the Fully 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 the fully diminished 7 chord. This chord is created by having a root flatted 3rd, flatted 5th or diminished triad but also by having a double flatted 7. The reason being for this is it sets up intervals of all nothing but flatted 3rds. In order to do that based off of the low e string or 6th string, let's go back and use once again, this minor 7 chord voicing as our basis as our point of departure here. This time I am going to use my 3rd finger to play the root note with. This allows me to use my index finger to play the double flatted 7. Here's my flatted 7. Now we need to play my double flatted 7. Here's my flatted 3rd and using my middle finger to play my flatted 5th. That's an A diminished 7. Taking that same chord and playing it now, a diminished 7 played off the 5th string in my opinion is a little bit easier. Let's start here with the minor 7. Okay. What we are going to do is have our root here, we are going to have a flatted 5th so we are going to take and flatten the 5th and minor 7. Here is normally our flatted 7; let's flat it one more time. As you stated earlier, a double flatted 7 so we have a root flatted 5th, double flatted 7 and here is our flatted 3rd. What is an easy way to think of that voicing is, think of it like a C sharp or D flat dominant 7 and then raise the root note. Take your middle finger and raise the root and if you thought of a D flat dominant 7, put your middle finger at the D note, you turn that D flat dominant 7 by playing D, you turn it into a D diminished 7. That is often times how we use that voicing. "