When creating chord voices to accompany a melody that has passing notes, the passing notes seem to lead naturally to diminished chords.
Why is that?
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
Not exactly sure what you're noticing.... are you considering the passing note part of a chord?
Passing tones are rhythmically weak notes that occur between the chords of the harmony; they're not harmonic notes - they just fill the space between one chord tone and another. So if the note you're considering is part of a chord, it's no longer a passing tone.
Passing tones can lead anywhere. Let's say you have a C chord moving to an F chord, I-IV. To keep things in simple root position, you've got:
G-C
E-A
C-F
The composer doesn't like the gap between G and C, so he fills it in with passing tones (in lower case):
G-a-b-C
E- A
C- F
The change is now I-IV with passsing tones. If you analyze the progression as C-Am-Cmaj7-F (I-vi-I-IV)... then you don't have passing tones.
When chromatic passing tones are used, the effect may be to augment or diminish the prior chord (or make it minor, major, suspended, etc.) - but again, if you think in those terms they're part of the harmony, and no longer passing.
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Consider if I have a melody in a C major tune that runs:
G-F-D and the harmony is playing a G7 chord.
Now suppose I add a passing note to make the melody line a bit more interesting, something like:
G-F#-F-D
Now, when the F# is being played, the effect with the rest of the G7 chord rining out is a dimished chord sound.
Or am I hearing things?
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
Ok, I see where you're coming from now...
Passing tones add a bit of dissonance (since they're non-harmonic tones). In your example, you've got a chord tone moving away from the chord chromatically. The effect on the sound you hear doesn't have to be diminished - it'll depend on which voice is moving, and in which direction.
Taking that G7 chord, G-B-D-F, you've got four notes that can move, and they can move up or down, giving you eight possibilities for the harmony you hear at the moment:
G#-B-D-F = diminished 7th with any note as the root (1-b3-b5-bb7)
Gb-B-D-F = Bm+11 (enharmonically, B-D-F#-E#)
G-Bb-D-F = Gm7
G-C-D-F = G7sus
G-B-D#-F = G7+
G-B-Db-F = G7b5
G-B-D-F# = Gmaj7
G-B-D-E = G6
So yeah, you're hearing that diminished type sound... but it's not something that always happens with passing tones - it's just a coincidence because of your initial chord, the voice you chose to move, and the direction you're heading.
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Ok... i guess I need to get more creative in my composing .. I get LOTS of diminished sounds ... so maybe I need to be aware of my tendancies and try to get a bit more interesting.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
There are a few chord sequences that are quite common. Personally, I don't call these "Passing" chords, I call them "connecting" chords.
For instance , to connect a G chord to a C chord, you could use a G/B chord (ascending bass line) or go from G to D/F# to Em (Descending bass line).
Your diminished chords are used more often to connect two chords whose roots are a whole step apart. The most common would be (1)a V chord connected to a VIm chord by a #V diminished chord: D to D#dim to Em in "Wind Beneath My Wings" in the key of G, for example. And (2) a I (tonic) chord connected to a IIm chord with a #1dim chord in between. An example would be the first three chords in "Friends in Low Places" in the key of A : A , A#dim , Bm .
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