[Applause] [Applause] hey there how are you i'm robert from master guitar academy welcome to another q a video the question this time is from alex in oregon and he asked me how do you use the diminished scale in blues well there are a few ways you can do that but i'm going to cover perhaps the most common approach in this lesson which is playing ideas coming from the diminished scale starting with a half step above the one chord [Applause] [Applause] mmm so hopefully you could hear that the second lick is the diminished idea taking us from the one chord to the four chord now before we have a look at the details of these ideas uh i just want to mention that you can submit a comment right here and i'll do my best to answer your question and you can also visit my website master guitar academy there's a link in the description on youtube where you can also submit a question and you can check out more of my work there all right so let's get to it so we're going to play three licks and the most interesting one here is of course the second lick which is using the diminished scale so let's talk about that first over dominant seven chords especially when you're going from the one chord which is in in this case is e7 to the four chord which in this case is a7 it's very common in jazz and fusion and the type of style music to play the diminished scale on this just before you go to the four chord while you're on the one chord and that's what i'm doing here in the second measure i'm going into diminished land so to speak now there are two ways you can look at the diminished scale the diminished scale is completely symmetrical it consists of half step whole step half step whole step and so on forever so the two ways you can look at it is to either start with a half step or you start with a whole step other than that they're the same right so when you play over a dominant seven chord you would start with a half step so if we play uh open e string at the bottom here a half step would be f and in order to continue its design i play whole a whole step right half hole half hole half hole and i'm back up here on the octave so that creates that sound and that's a common approach to use that scale over that dominant chord just before you go to the four chord now the other way you could view it is you start with a whole step and it would sound different in this case because then i would i would play like this and that is the diminished scale that you can use over an e minor actually but you wouldn't use that design or that version of it if you play on a dominant 7 chord so keep that in mind dominant seven chord half step is how you start from the root note and if it's a minor chord you start with a whole step but in this case there are no minor chords so we're going to stick to the starting with a half step all right so uh since it's a symmetrical scale you can do all sorts of cool things with the diminished scale so i'm going to show you one approach that's pretty common so if we look again at the design of it if we play three notes starting with a half step you see the third note is three frets above the one i started on and that's called a minor third if you look at intervals so we can play it actually those two together like this same thing as this right now we can then play another minor third a half step above that because if we look at the sign of the scale here will be the fourth note and it's a minor third above the second note right so those two together there's minor third and here's the next minor third now shift everything a whole step and do a minor third again and then a half step and so on so it repeats so you could play it like right it's just very symmetrical so that's one approach for this and that's what i'm using for this lick that i'm playing the second one so the first one and then i'm using that approach to take me from e7 over to a7 and i'm ending on the major third for a seven so there if you look at the first note i do slide in up to e here and then this note is the minor third so these two together is is a minor third you can view it as a grip it's the same as this right so we can take this and move it half step whole step half step whole step and so on right and that's what i'm doing in the leg so i'm just sliding in here and then back and back up to this one sliding it up half step here i'm repeating i'm ending on that note because then that happens over the a7 right so that's a cool little approach you can do those type of things too because it's the same distance from here to here or here the same thing is any such pattern you can move and have so half step whole step and if you play only stacked minor thirds you get the diminished arpeggio so each note is the same difference uh distance apart uh one and a half whole steps that's cool too i think uh shredders use that right that kind of stuff anyway that's the second lick so let's go back to the first one then just to go over that briefly i think that sounds cool it's kind of a funky thing and i view it as a dorian lick because of this note which is the major six if we mix that into a minor scale we can view it as a dorian thing coming from the dorian mode so i'm just starting on the minor third up here back to root note and then to the sixth and then up to the minor third again and play it staccato like short and then back to uh e the root note again so that's very simple i tend to bend the first one a little bit because the you know the blue sea soul in me i guess wants to bend thirds a little bit and then comes the so that's the first measure right then the second measure that's when we throw in the diminished thing and then ends on a7 and at a point i'm playing a lick that i view as a hybrid scale something i have actually course on on my website it basically means that you combine more than one mode or one scale together and you get you get more notes but they're easier to recognize so this is a hybrid scale that i use a lot where we have uh dorian and blues scale mixed together you know those kind of runs coming from that hybrid scale so the lick i'm playing that's the first part so i'm doing a hammer on from the second to the major third for a and then i play the fifth and the seventh of a the minor seventh and you want to play that with a kind of a swingy funky 16th note feel and then the second part of it uh at that point i'm playing i go back to here to the third and then up to the note d here and then i go backwards and then i'm playing uh b flat here and then back up to b back to b flat and do slide down to a and to g and then i play a and g and e and back up to e to g i mean so again the whole thing and it sounds cool so when this happens over the one chord e then you have dorian or mixolydian here and then you have blues scale here and then pentatonic the rest really but i like that sound when you get the six and the minor i mean the flat five in there this cool sound the major 6 and flat 5 together with the the minor pentatonic so that's the whole thing three licks in total where the second one is the cool one that has that more unusual sound that goes using the diminished goes from the one chord to the four chord so let me play just slowly all three together to see what that sounds like and then you can play the same thing over and over actually because that those three lakes together cover this loop that i'm doing the vamp going from e7 to a7 and back so there you have it all right thanks guys for checking this out i hope you found it useful let me know okay i'll see you next time you