Jazz Basics

How Diminished Chords Work

Diminished chords are built from small stacked intervals and create immediate tension. They are short, symmetrical, and very useful.

The shape is:

1 3 b5 6

On Cdim7:

Cdim7

With dim7, the chord name already tells you that the 3rd and 7th belong to the diminished sound.

So here, 1 3 b5 6 means:

  • 1
  • b 3
  • b 5
  • bb 7 written enharmonically as 6

Compared with Cmaj7, the chord is much more compressed and unstable:

Cmaj7 and Cdim7

One simple move is to shift it by minor thirds:

Moving diminished shape

That repeating shape is one reason diminished chords are easy to move around.

Practice it in the app

Open Chord Progressions to loop progressions, change the tempo, and practice with piano, bass, and drums in real time.

Open the app