Kawai Piano Lessons: Use Diminished Chords Like a Pro

Want to add instant tension and drama to your piano playing? In this quick lesson, pianist Michael teaches you how to transform any major chord into a diminished chord with just two simple half-step movements—and how to resolve it for a professional, expressive sound.

Watch the full lesson above, or follow along with the complete transcript below.

Video Transcript

Hi there. My name is Michael. In this lesson, we’re going to be working on tension in chords. Tension and release is one of the most fundamental principles in music and you’re going to be finding it in your entire musical journey as a pianist, composer, and improviser. Here’s a simple exercise you can do to get comfortable shifting in and out of major and minor chords.

The types of tension chords that we’re going to be exploring today are diminished chords. You can make a diminished chord by taking a major chord and dropping the top note and the middle note down one half step.

Diminished chords have a very natural resolution back to their major chord, so this exercise is just going to be focusing on that, that you can use it nicely at the end of a phrase like this.

Let’s just practice that in all 12 keys. Let’s use a metronome so that we keep things in time.

Practice this in C, get comfortable with it and then try it in the next key.

Diminished chords can be a great exercise to just add a little bit of tension at the end of a phrase. If you want a more advanced diminished chord to try and use, I would say instead of just using the diminished triad, you can add this note to it and resolve it down. Of course, this is a little bit more advanced, but it can be used in the same way.

Practice this with a metronome and slowly bring it up to speed. If you make a mistake, just go a little bit slower and bring it back up. For sheet music for everything that we discussed today, go to Kawaius.com. Till next time