Diminished Scales

Diminished scales are awesome for a few different reasons. Diminished scales have an additional note compared to traditional scales. Having an 8-note scale can be very musical when practicing because your timing lands you on a down beat. Another cool thing about diminished scales is that there are only two types of scales. 

Type 1: Whole-Half Diminished

The Whole-Half Diminished scale gets its name from the formula at the start of the scale. In this case, the first couple of intervals are a whole-step followed by a half-step. The formula for the entire scale is WHWHWHWH. 

The C Whole-Half Diminished scale is pretty self-explanatory here. There are a couple of cool tricks to know that will help you understand this scale. First, the scale really consists of 4 “Micro Scales” that are all parallel to each other. Each of these micro-scales consists of only 2 notes, a whole-step away from each other. The beginning of each micro-scale is at each chord tone of the diminished chord (C, Eb, Gb, and A). Also, because of this pararallelism this scale also consists of the same exact pitches as three other WH Diminished scales, which also correspond with the notes belonging to the chord (Eb, Gb, and A). You can think of these as sort of parallel modes in relation to each other. Grasping this concept will speed up your knowledge of these scales like a shortcut. 

Now that we understand that, you will realize that there are only three WH Diminished scales: C, Db, and D. Because when we arrive at Eb we are reusing the same notes as The C WH Dininished scale. Likewise, E will consist of the same notes as Db, and so on. 

Below are the WH Diminshed scales for Db and D: 

With these three examples, you should be able to practice the Whole-Half Diminished scale in every key! 

Type 2: Half-Whole Diminished Scale 

You’ve probably guessed by now that the other type of Diminished scale is the Half-Whole Diminished scale. All of the same formulas apply to this scale as the Whole-Half. The parallelisms are the same. The formula is HWHWHWHW. This scale is the more popular of the two types because it has a natural 3rd and flatted 7th notes. This makes it very applicaple to be used over a dominant chord and you get the flavors of the flatted 9th and / or sharped 9th. Here are the three Half-Whole Diminished scales: 

This scale is also very similar to the Super-Locrian Scale we looked at last week. The only difference between the two is at the top end, where the diminished scale uses the natural 5th and 6th notes and the Super-Locrian uses a flatted 6th in place of those two notes. 

Try experimenting using this scale over dominant chords. It works great as an alternative to the traditional altered sound. 

Enjoy!