Although Chris Stamey is best known as being part of the original dB’s, the legendary jangle-pop combo from Winston Salem, N.C., that sprouted wings when they moved to NYC in the late ’70s, his solo work has always been equally fascinating. Soon after cutting Stands For deciBels and Repercussion, the seminal band’s longplayers tracked in the early ’80s, Stamey pulled up stakes and returned to churning out his own hackle-raising sound. He has resurfaced recently as part of a fertile duo with Peter Holsapple, but it’s albums like his current solo release, Lovesick Blues (Yep Roc), that keep his one-man trip smoldering like a late-October controlled burn in the N.C. tobacco fields while light rain begins to fall. Stamey will guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62tfKcR_-kE
Stamey: If you play guitar, you probably started on the “cowboy” major chords: G, D, C, E, A and worked in some A, D and E minors before too long. Then you learned to stack other thirds intervals on the top of them, where they teetered like children’s blocks, and, from there, turn them into 7th chords, 9th chords and on up, for richer and “jazzier,” more open sounds. Maybe you discovered playing the chord positions on the “wrong” frets and came up with colorful open-string combinations or learned how to do things with capos. It’s possible to proceed far down this path without ever realizing that you are missing out on the tesseract of chords: the noble, neglected diminished 7th. Which is a pity: You need this one.
It’s kind of a mobius-strip chord, in that you can build it on any note, C, C#, D, Eb, etc., but when it comes down to it, there are not 12 versions, only three of them, in different inversions. It’s also a bit of a black hole, collapsed in on itself—you take an A minor 7th chord, for example, let the E (5th) deflate to an Eb and the G (7th) down to an F#. Now there is a minor third interval between every note, which makes for a lot of tension; looking at it another way, there’s a flat 5 (the tritone, the Devil and Tony Iommi‘s interval) between every other note.
What’s the point? Why fool with this finger-squeezing fret cluster? Here why: The diminished chord, like something out of quantum physics, exists simultaneously in four keys at once! In our A diminished 7th (A, C, Eb, F#) example, it can move from its A note up to a Bb with a sense of resolution/relaxation. But it can do the same from its C note (up to Db), from its Eb note (up to E natural, or Fb if you want to get picky), from its F# note (up to G). So, let’s say you are in the key of Bb, have been moving through it all through your verse, with some Fs and Ebs and C minors. But you want to modulate to the distant key of G for the chorus? Grab a diminished 7th. Just end the verse on an A diminished 7th (which is in the key of Bb so it sounds logical) and then, pivoting through the tesseract, go to the G—ah, that works! (The A diminished 7 has the same notes, and is pretty much the same chord as the F# diminished 7, which is in the key of G. That’s what lets this work.)
To try to put some clothes on this alphabet soup, I’ve included two places I’ve used this in songs, myself, at this link: In the bridge of “Kierkegaard” (my Travels In The South record) and in the bridge of “Far Away And Long Ago” (from Falling Off the Sky by the dB’s).
This collapsed, dissonant chord can be your church key to open up new spaces and colors in your songwriting. Try it and see. Just practice playing a diminished 7, then following it with a chord rooted on any note that’s one step higher than any of its four notes. (And where to go after this? The equally noble augmented chord—a bizzaro version of the diminished 7th in that it has all major thirds, only three notes, and there are only four of them—beckons.)
Part two of the video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N7_SsU0pIY
