CESH Of The Century!

You might've read my previous article on common tone diminished chords (a secret technique to spice up your chord progressions). If not, click here to check it out! The following is a continuation of that article.

The year is 2018 and everyone is talking about the B-flat Major7 chord with a C in the bass. Is it a 9th chord in 1st inversion or a sus 13th chord? It's the 2k18 sound. Who cares! I'm more concerned about CESH.

CESH is just a fancy acronym for Chromatic Embellishment of Static Harmony. You every read through a boring chart that is something like G7 for 4 bars, followed by C7 for 4 bars? CESH is a way of embellishing such a progression so that one doesn't fall asleep on the gig. While working on common tone diminished chords for my previous article, I realized that chords like these were an effective tool for incorporating CESH.

Let's start with a G7 chord:

Ex 1: G7

Boring, huh? There's a few different ways of making it more interesting. The way I'm going to show you starts with playing it in each inversion:

Ex 2: G7 Inversions

You can play these up and down the neck of the guitar. I recommend practicing them in every key, on every string set, ascending and descending. But that is still pretty vanilla. A way of decorating this figure is by using common tone diminished chords. The common tone diminished chord is an embellishment that maintains one tone of the dominant voicing (usually the root) and moves the other three notes down by a half step. It is discussed more in my previous article.

Ex 3: G7 Inversions with common tone diminished chords in between

Now, this sounds pretty cool. You're essentially playing one chord here but there's a lot of tension provided by the chromaticism. This is a sound used in 19th century music. After practicing  Ex 3 for a while, I thought, there must be a way to make it even hipper! And thus I came up with the following:


Ex 4: Chromatic Interpolation of Common Tone Diminished Chords

Lo and behold! The CESH of the Century! A decoration of a simple G7 chord, this figure includes every note known to man! And then some! This awesomeness is achieved by playing all of your G7 voicings, alternating with fully diminished chords on every single fret in between. It's not too difficult to play, but if you pull it off, you're friends will think you're some kind of jazz wizard.

Now I will demonstrate the madness of everything I explained above.

Thoughts? Questions? Have any ideas for other ways of incorporating CESH? Let me know in the comments below!

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