Thursday 1 May 2014

Thoughts on Fully Diminished 7ths..


It's amazing what one realises late at night.

I was thinking about diminished 7ths. I don't know what it is about them, but I love them. This is probably because you can shift key with them, or just modulate to a different key, but a dominant 7th chord has become more popular to do so. As a result, fully diminished 7ths have become less popular in modern music. In fact, I also like them because there are more ways that a diminished seventh can lead to various keys than a dominant seventh.


I have a piano program on my computer - so pretty much an interactive piano keyboard on my screen.

I began by playing a C fully diminished 7th. I then played an F# fully diminished 7th.

I frowned. And played them again. I double and triple checked that I was playing the right notes.

My discovery? When you play the C fully diminished seventh in it's 2nd inversion, you are playing the exact same keys as an F# fully diminished 7th. Call me crazy, but I never realised this before. Maybe it's because I haven't really played around with diminished sevenths.

But then I thought: What makes the difference between an F# fully diminished 7th, and a C fully diminished 7th in it's second inversion? The answer was rather obvious to me, but I have heard people complain about this sort of thing
.
'There isn't a difference!', they cry out, as they rack their brains trying to figure it out. Their souls weary of the complexity of music, they just want it to be simple. So they say the easiest answer. 'There isn't one.'

But in reality, there is. It's the spelling of the chord.

I mean, as an analogy: 'joyful

F# fully diminished 7 has these notes:

F#, A, C, F double flat

C fully diminished 7 has these notes:

C, Eb, Gb, B double flat (the second inversion has the notes in this order: Gb, B double flat, Eb, Gb )

If you look at them - on a keyboard, F# has the same pitch as Gb, A has the same pitch as B double flat, C has the same pitching as C, and F double flat has the same pitching as Eb.

But it's the way the notes are written on the page that make a difference.

B double flat and A may have the same pitching on a piano, but by no means does that make them the same note. They are two different notes. Same pitching. Different notes. That's why we have keys like C# major and Db major. When you play them, they sound exactly the same - the technique is the same. But the way they are written on paper is what makes a difference between the two.

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