 Guitar and Excel, open chords, C major scale, B diminished, seventh chord, fingering. Get ready because although it's not fun to either fret or B board, it is fun when you put them both together resulting in the fret board. Because the fret board gives you something to play with, which eliminates the boredom and distracts you from the stuff you were fretting about. So let's do it. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay because we basically built this from a blank worksheet, but we did so in a prior section. So if you want to build this from a blank worksheet, you may want to begin back there. However, you don't necessarily need access to this workbook if looking at this from a music theory standpoint, because we'll simply use this as a tool to map out the fret board, give us the notes, give us the scale, give us the chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook, though, there's currently like nine tabs down below. We've got eight of these example tabs, one O.G. Orange tab and the practice tab. The O.G. Orange tab represent in the original worksheet we put together in a prior section. It now acting as our starting point going forward, mapping out the entire fret board, giving us the entire musical alphabet in letters, numbers, and combining them both, providing a key that can be adjusted with this green cell, adjusting the scales that we are in for the worksheets on the right hand side, giving us the notes that are in that scale and the chord constructions from that scale. We then wanted to focus in on the C major scale and then look at the chord constructions within that scale, starting with the one chord, which is on the first tab, mapping that out on the fret board in open position, being defined as frets zero through three, mapping out the one, two, three of the chord, discussing it in detail. We then moved to the four chord, the four chord because the four chord is going to be similar in that it's a major chord construction and therefore we mapped it out and discussed it in detail. And then we went to the five chord, which is the G major chord, also a major chord, mapped it on the fret board, discussed it. Then we went back to the minors, not that the minors are worse than the majors because it's not bass ball here. The minors just as good, but we went to the two chord and mapped it out. And then we went to the three chord, which is the E minor and mapped it out. And then we went to the sixth chord, which is the A minor. We mapped it out and discussed, man, we did a lot of stuff. In any case, now we're on the chord constructed from the seventh note, the seventh chord. And this is going to be the diminished. So I'm going to go to the worksheet on the right. This is where we are at this point in time. So we have copied the OG tab over. We've hidden a bunch of cells. So we can just see frets zero through three, which I'm saying is open position. This upper E string on the top is this is the string closest to the ceiling. I think that's the easiest way to visualize the guitar. That's why I put it that way. And then we have our worksheet on the right hand side, which is in the key of C mapping out the notes in the key of C and the chords related to them. We are now focused on the chord construction from the seventh note in the scale, which is a diminished chord indicated by this little dot. Now note, if you look at these Roman numerals, which is a kind of standardized way to represents the notes in the scale, we remember that the uppercase are going to be indicating that the construction of the chord from that position will give us major, the lowercase giving us minor. And then this one is lowercase, but I put a little dot next to it. And that's going to give us the idea that it is kind of minor still out in that it's going to have the position for the third that will be like a flat third, it'll be three notes instead of four. That's the major difference between the major and the minor, but it also has that weird difference over here on the fifth. That's why I've made this yellow. These absolute distances are just for that first chord. So it's going to be different. We're flatting. It's not going to be seven away, but it's going to be six away. And that's going to be the characteristic thing that you want to be keeping in mind when you're looking at this diminished structure because that's the thing that's different from both the major and the minor. So then we're going to just map it out here. Let's think about the fingering of it, and then we'll get into it in more detail. So we'll go into the actual guitar here. And we're saying we can construct this a few different ways. I think one of the easiest ways to see it is to actually just pick up the B. The B is right there. And then note this relationship between the B and the root string and the string below it is going to look a little strange. That should look a little strange because most of the chord constructions we worked with, if this was, for example, a B major or minor, that position would be here. It would look like a power chord between the one and the five. And we could see that like if we go to like an A over here, if you played like a power chord off the A, you got the relationship between the one and the five that looks like that. So now we're flatting that. So right, instead of having this relationship, which would be a power chord kind of relationship one and the five, we're flatting that and bringing it in here. So anytime you see that, that's when you're thinking, oh, that's going to give you that kind of distinctive tensiony type of sound, which is useful because it's that also a resolving type of sound. So it's a lot of interesting things can happen around it because then you want to resolve that to something else. And then we could pick the D up down here. So here's the D and I could just mute then this G because I'm muting it with the meat of this finger. So that's one way that you can pretty easily see that that chord. Now, if you were to ring out the G, you could try that right because it's still a chord that has been constructed from the C major scale. So all of the open notes should still basically in theory work with with that as well. And how did we construct this? By the way, we just started on the seven over here and went around the circle every other note just like we did before. And when we do that because of the whole whole half construction of the scale, that's why we end up with the intervals that we do. By the way, I also added this is like a circle of thirds down below. And this might be a little bit easier to look at, you know, when we're when we're building this stuff out, I'm skipping every other note, like if I started at a C, I skipped an every other note to get to the E to get to the G to get to the B. I could just map that out down here. All this is doing is doing is taking the C and then I skipped the note to get to the to the E and then I skipped a note to get to the G and I skipped a note to get to the B, right? So now it's like I'm taking the circle circle of thirds basically. So and that might be a little bit easier because if I started on the B, now I could just say, Well, there's the B, there's the D, there's the F, which is which is basically the same thing as saying up here, I took the B, I skipped the C to get to the D, and I skipped the E to get to the F, right? So I think that might be a little new addition that I kind of put in there before and I might try to squeeze that into our worksheets, even though I kind of clearly kind of squeezed it in here. So, so there's that. So there's that. Now, just to note how you might use this position, because because the most common use probably would be to resolve to the C, right? So it'd be something. So that's the kind of sound that you're basically looking for oftentimes when you're seeing that diminished. So usually, when you're kind of fingering this, you're probably going to be playing in some other key, making the one note, for example, the root. And then when you're going to go back home to C, you might try to add a little bit more tension, you could see that note is right, and you can build it by saying, this is where I want to go. And so I'm going to build it by the note right before it. And then I'm going to have that distinctive destruction of from this string to this string. And then I'll pick up this one down here. So, so we can just go C, A minor, F, I'm just kind of making things up. And then I'm going to go back home. But before I do, I'm going to hit that seven diminished. And then it kind of gives you that resolvy type of feeling. Now, you could try to play, make that your root, right? You could try to make this the root. And then you would basically be playing like in a Locrian, Locian type of mode, which is a strange mode that's difficult to do. Because it's that's not really what you would think the use of it would kind of be, but you could try it, and you get an unusual kind of sound. So I can try to say, what if I just play that? See, I'm trying to make it so that's my resolving sound to go home to it. But it's difficult to do that, because of all that tension means that it wants to resolve somewhere else. So that's why the even though I think this chord itself is useful, I thinking of it as its own mode is more difficult, or you know, you would think about it a different way as some of these other modes. Obviously, if you look at the A minor mode, it's quite easy to make something sound like it's an A minor using the same notes and then then in a in a C. And same with most of the other modes, you could basically work with it to get it to resolve and make it sound like it's resolving there. So with this one in particular, you're usually going to resolve to some to something else. And usually you want to resolve home that half step is the thing that pulls us, you know, pulls us back home, and you get that nice feeling. And that sometimes I think that's easier to see like on one string. So if I started on the C, for example, and I went to my og tab, and I was to and I was to say, Okay, I'm going to start on the C. And I'm just going to use this pattern of two steps up, two steps up, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step. And that's going to be our scale on one string, right? So two steps up, two steps up, one step up, two steps. And then you get back to the C right there. And you see how that last step right there, which is that half step makes that tensiony kind of pull back. So that's kind of what we're looking for oftentimes. That's what the C major scale really has going for it in some, in some sense that like the minor scale doesn't have as much because you don't have that same resolution or half step at the end of the minor scale. And so you want to sometimes it's useful to emphasize that. But when you build a chord around it, like if I'm just noodling around, I could, I could just do that. And then I could basically go to go from the note before it taking that half step up. But if I'm trying to build a chord around it, you end up with that diminished type of chord that gives you that basically kind of resolution. And remember that that diminished chord also has some relationship to the five, which is often a chord that we resolve to as well. So that five here, a G type of chord, if I add the seven to it, then you get something that looks very similar B, D, E, B, I mean, sorry, B, D, F, B, D, F, and then there's a G. So notice if I took this shape, and I just put my finger up here to the G, now you've got basically that dominant fifth. So same kind of thing, except now you've added the fifth note on top of it, which resolves nicely back to the one. So that's the general idea. Now when you're playing it kind of in position here, remember, I'm kind of using this as my pivot point on this finger. So if I'm kind of maneuvering around here, I'm playing my E, I could play my G this way. So if I'm trying to keep that as my basically kind of my home finger, and I'm going back then, and I'm going to play that diminished, then I might keep this finger down and be a little bit more economical with the fingering. And then even though I have this finger down, I'm also fingering this one here. So that finger is not really doing anything. I could lift it up. And then you can play it with these three fingers. So then it's more economical to resolve it back then, while your hand is in kind of the same position. So that's another fingering position, same kind of idea with the chord. Now just like we did before, you could then say, well, I'm going to add other items from the scale because we're still building this from the C major. So I'm going to go down here and say, all these blue notes, then fit within there as well. So it's probably less likely like when you're kind of jamming around in these, these other chords, you might lift up some fingers, right, and do that a lot and kind of embellish a lot of them. That might not be so much the case when you're over here embellishing this chord, because it's usually meant as kind of a chord that's going to give you tension that then you resolve to. But the same concept would be there that if you're if you're over here and you're saying, okay, what if I wanted to add some other notes that are in that that are in the scale, you could try to pick up some of the open notes, of course, is one way that you could start exploring around that and see what the sound is like. And so you could say, okay, for example, you could, you know, pull in that E and just play out the E. You could then say, well, what if I tried to put my f up here. So you might actually say, okay, well, now I'm going to be picking up the f and this is kind of interesting because you can kind of see the pattern, this pattern of the diagonal kind of pattern here and possibly pick up the D down below resolving to the C. You could try picking up some fingers. Now notice that you probably are not going to be picking like you could do that, right? You could try to try to say, okay, I'm going to pick up this finger and then resolve it, right? Or pick up, try to pick up this finger and say, okay, well, what if I was going to get, but you're probably going to want to put those two fingers in particular down because that's like the heart of that sound. It gives you that tension that's you're trying to get to resolve is usually what you're using it for to get back to the C. And so we could do it with this one, you could try lifting up this finger. So we could say, okay, now that doesn't really take away from the major, you know, the major sound you're going for. And you could still resolve there and then you could try to add notes within there, right? If I was taking these two, and I have then this string that I could ring out so I can make sure that G rings out if I want, or I can mute this string. We can also pick up the A here, which is a fairly common fingering of this because now you're picking up the seven note of it as well. So we had it before, fingering this here, the one down one and up one and then down here. I want to add in that A, so I'm going to have to move this finger back to the A, leaving this finger open to pick it up here, and then this finger down here. So now I've got a little bit more difficult shape to finger, but it's probably the way that you get that seven in there. We'll talk more about sevens later, but so you get that but really the root of the feeling of course is these two strings. And if this is easier to play, you kind of can play with it in that format as well. Okay, so then we could know we noted before that when we constructed this that this is a funny chord construction when you think about it in relation to the pentatonic scale in the key of C, because the pentatonic scale is five out of the seven notes. We constructed this all the all the chords from all seven notes and the seven chord has two out of the three notes in the chord that don't fit in the pentatonic scale. So just kind of an interesting thing to note. So when you're kind of noodling around with this, you could you could just note that when you're getting to like this chord. But again, this is usually kind of a passing chord that you're going through to get back to a resolving home, not one that you're going to, you know, spend a whole lot of time on. Oftentimes it has its uses though. So then we can go down here and say, Well, we talked before when we looked at all the rest of these, like when we talked about the C, we said, Well, that's a major construction. So you could, for example, move the C up to the to the fourth fret. I'm sorry to the F, right? And I can move that position up here and have a movable type of shape. Now note with this one, we don't really have the same kind of concept of a movable shape in the same scale. That shape is movable. And in that, if I was to move, say this shape up, if I wanted to play a diminished chords up here, I can move that same shape up. However, I don't have another diminished chord within the scale. So it's not like I'm going, it's not like I like if I took any other chord up here, I can be jamming around and see and bring it up to here, or I could I could be jamming with my when I get to a G here, when I when I get to let's say the F, and I can move that shape up to this position, which is a G same shape, right? And I can move it up and down the neck because we have minor chord constructions and major chord constructions, which means the fingering will be the same. When you move this up the neck, the fingering will be the same to get to a diminished chord. But there's only one diminished chord in the scale that we're constructing right in either a major or minor scale. So we don't have that that rationale as to why we're just going to go off with it and go up and down the neck with that one thing. But you still have a concept that you might go up and down the neck with or how how you might use the same concept, rather than just that one chord to get some more out of it. So I'm going to unhide here and see the more the neck out to 12 frets. And then right click and hide. So so now notice when I when I look at the concept would be that this this chord, I'm just thinking of it as a resolution chord. So I'm picking that up and resolving back to the C. Now I could take that same concept and say, Well, what if I moved that C chord? Here's my C shape, the green C shape. And what if I moved it up here to an F? I can do that because I know that that's a that's a shape. It's the same shape. I'm using kind of like a caged system, right? And I'm moving that shape up till I hit that note till it hits an F. We'll talk more about the cage system later. But I just want to note that you could then say, Well, if I want to make that something that I'm trying to resolve to give it a little bit more pull to it, then I might do a minor a diminished chord construction in front of it. I might take that root note, go to the one before it. And at its base level, I'm just going to do this, right? I'm going to give it that little tensiony thing right before I hit there. So notice that that might not be in the same key those notes. I'm not thinking right now that I'm in the same key. So note when we look at this, we're, what we're going to do is we're going to we're going to learn everything in terms of the key of C. But then once you do that, you try to think about when would it be appropriate for me to break that kind of arbitrary rule that we have to play everything just in the key of C, right? And one reason might be that I'm trying to give a little bit more color to resolve to a note like the home note here. So that's one way that you might use it, you might be saying, Okay, well, if I'm going to find playing in the key of C to an A to a G, or maybe play the G up here, because now I'm moving up, I'm trying and I'm targeting that note, I'm going to go up to that note. And then I'm going to build right before that little minor construction, even just with those two and then resolve. So, so it gives you a little bit of feeling like, Hey, that's a little bit weird. It might not feel quite right. But then when you resolve, it gives you that kind of relief possibly, right? That's one way you can think of trying to put it in there. So I'm in a C, I go to A, I go to a G. And then I'm going to go to that diminished thing right before I get to that F shape and then resolve to the F and that F now kind of sounds like more important because I pulled to it and that I can go back to my C or whatever I want to do there, you can do the similar thing if I move this whole shape up to a G, right? So if I said, Okay, I'm going to move this up to a G up here. And I'm just jamming around and I'm like, Okay, I'm like, Okay, I'm doing this. And then I'm going to my F. And I'm like going back to my C. And I'm going up here to my G with the same C shape. But then like when I go up to this G, I'm going, Okay, maybe to emphasize that G more, I'm going to, I'm going to take that root note and go right behind it. Because that's my leading note and add that shape right there. And I could have this, I don't even really need it, but I could have it. So now I'm like, C, F, and then I'm going on that G. But I'm like, I'm trying to put a little bit more tension right before I get there. So you can kind of experiment with that kind of thing. Again, you're not looking at this as though it's in the key. You're looking at this as though you're doing something special to emphasize possibly because it's outside of the key, given a given it a little bit more emphasis, you can do that in open position too. So I could take any of these, like I took, I could take the F in open position, which looks like this shape, right? And I can say, okay, where's the root of that shape? The root is right here. If I looked at the F, let's actually go to an F chord over here. And so here's the F shape, right? And then I'm going to be like, okay, well, what if I right before that F note, I'm going to take that right there and then and then do like a diminished thing like that right before I get there, right? So if I'm if I'm going from like a C, and then I'm going to go to the F and I know that's the root of the F, even though I'm going to hold down this finger up top to I can move this down. I'm not going to. So I'm going to say, so, so then I'm going to build this one, the one right behind it. Now it's on the string below, but that's okay. It's still all I really need are those two strings to get that kind of feeling. But I could pick up this one down here too. And then kind of resolve to the F. So if I'm in the key of C, and then I'm going to try to emphasize that F and I'm going to be like, and then it sounds a little wonky until you kind of resolve it. You could also try to make the F like the center, which means you would be playing in a mode, right? So now I'm playing all the notes in the key of C, but I'm starting on an F and trying to trying to give that little tensiony feel right before I get back to the F. So you can kind of experiment with that. And you can also even do it with I believe with the minors and play with it on on the minor sound. Notice that when you do a minor construction, you don't have the same resolution. It's one of the issues with the minor minors. I love the minor sound. But with the major at the end, you get that resolution sound half step going to the minor. Whereas so for example, if you go here, you've got that half step that goes back home. But like if you look at the minor construction, the the it looks like this whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, and then you've got a whole step going back to the home. You don't get and that means you don't get that same kind of pole going back home. So you could again, try to artificially put that pole in by adding that tensiony note, right? So I could be like, if I'm in a if I'm playing this is my a minor same course, but I'm playing around the six now. When we first look at the a minor shape in open position, it could be a little confusing in terms of how we're going to apply the concept because we're going to look for the root and we're going to say, okay, there's the root. It's the open a right there. You can't get behind that because it's it's on the nut. So here there's another a though. So there's an a right there. I could get behind that which would be this note and noting that that one is not in the key and that but that's the point because now we're on a minor, a minor note, and we're kind of adding something to add that kind of major feeling to it to give that half step that leads home. Now notice usually the other string would be back here. But because there's that funny relationship between these two strings, you can move it back to there. That's that's how it would have to look. So then you could say, okay, well, if I do that same kind of thing, I'm going from and then I'm going to lead back home to an a. I'm going to take that a right there. I'm going to go before it and play just these two strings possibly right and then it kind of gives you that same feeling leading back home. I'm adding something that's outside of the key, but it gives you that leading feeling back home. So you notice that you also kind of get that in like a minor chord construction when people look at say the four chord on the minor. So if this was an A minor, I'm sorry, the five chord on the A minor. So notice the one four, five in the related minor, a minor here is going to be all the minor chords. A, D, E, A. Sometimes on this five here, if we want to give it to more pull to come to home, then sometimes they you could switch from this E up top and then you can put your finger down. This is an E minor to switch it to basically making an E major. And so so notice if you have your and what what's that? What is that doing? That's basically that's basically put taking picking up this note again. So the E is up top the E minor are these two notes. And so those are both in the key. But then if you want to go from that E back home, you can add this note, right, which gives you that which gives you that resolving type of feeling that resolving type of feeling. So adding that note to make it an E major, which is outside the key, but notice the resolve back to the minor. So E minor, adding the major note. And that's the same concept because it's moving from here to here, you can do it up the neck to like if I looked at my A up top here. Here's an A minor chord construction. And if I went right before that A, and did my normal kind of concern, you could do it right there anywhere up the neck, right? I could just go right before where I want to land, and then build that funny construction. Right. So if I'm playing an A minor, start with an A and open position, I moved to like a C. And then I'm going to go to a G. Just this is another position for that G, but I'm playing it this way because I'm leading up to this A right there. But right before I get to that A, I'm going to go a step behind it and build that and leads into the ending note, right? So A minor, C, and then my built diminished. So you can, so you can try to play, that's how you can kind of move, you know, this shape around and possibly try to utilize it rather than just having it as one kind of static thing that only has basically one role to it, which is one reason that a lot of people kind of avoid it because you can't be like just jamming around like you can't really do that with the diminished. But you can't use it as like a leading kind of tone and still kind of move it around and work it into what you're doing.