As creative improvisers, we’re thought of as being very free with our approach to music. But a lot of us end up practicing patterns an awful lot, particularly where diminished scales and harmonies are concerned. Not that this is bad; it’s a beneficial and necessary step to take in the mastery of the keyboard.

Where improvisation is concerned, though, we often end up playing what we practice, and knowing your diminished scales doesn’t necessarily lead you to a lot of creative experimentation. Many of us use the diminished scale and chord simply as a sound.

So I’d like to introduce you to a framework for practicing freedom and incorporating it into your playing, in a way that gets very interesting sonic results. The goal is to help you be free with creating voicings and lines, just by starting out with a diminished seventh chord, one of the more utilitarian chords in our bag of tricks. You then alter the sound you’re playing by borrowing from the diminished chord one half-step above or below the one you’ve started with. From there, it’s simply a question of mixing and matching.

Keep in mind that when we mention the min7b5 voicing, you can also think of it as a min6 with the root a third higher; the same goes for min7 voicings, which are maj6 chords with a root a sixth higher; this makes it easier to think of moving the voicings up and down the corresponding maj6 or min6 scale. It’s not as important to think what the new chord is before you play it; just think of reaching up or down to create cool voicings.

Check out the chart below.

If you lower any note of the middle diminished chord, you get a dominant seventh chord; so you have a family of four possible dominant seventh chords to work from. If you raise any of the notes, you get a family of min7b5 chords— II chords—which are themselves related to the family of dominant seventh chords— V chords—we just mentioned. Since these chords are all related by their II-V connections, they’re available to you to use as you wish; you can think of it as a family of II chords above the middle diminished seventh chord, that are related to the family of V chords below the middle diminished chord.

Enough discussion. Jump in and play through the examples beginning below, and hear what you can do by looking at the diminished seventh chord this way. Practice these examples in all 12 keys, but remember to just experiment with simply borrowing from above and below. I hope you’ll experience a new world of colours at your fingertips.