Chord quality substitution and other harmonic tricks

Podcast #5 - Additional notes

© Copyright Darren Dutson Bromley 2012

Chord quality substitution and other harmonic tricks.

There are many effective chord substitutions you can use to embellish a chord progression, we’ll touch on many of these throughout the course of the podcasts. Many follow rules to help you apply them and while none is guaranteed to work in every musical situation you have a pretty good idea what will probably work and what won’t.

A substitution which is much less restricted is the chord quality substitution, this is where you can change the gender of the chord; a major chord could become a minor chord, a dominant 7th could become major 7th etc. There are a number of things to consider with this kind of substitution, the melody being probably the main one but ultimately the guiding factor boils down to this one rule: if it sounds good, it is good.

Let’s look at some musical situations where chord quality can be used. We’ve talked about the I - vi - ii - V progression so let’s begin there.

The chords in the key of G major are:

The I - vi - ii - V progression in G major would be:

We could change chord ii to a dominant 7th, this is a chord quality substitution.

We could also change chord vi to a dominant 7th. The progression still retains its original integrity, the substitute chords don’t detract from this but they do add a different colour to the progression.

Another useful characteristic of chord quality substitution is the option of applying more than one substitution.

Taking our I - vi - ii - V progression, with chord quality substitutions we could apply a tritone substitution to the E7, arriving at Bb7, the dominant chord whose root is a flat 5th above.

We could also do the same with D7 giving Ab7:

Another possibility is a tritone substitution on the A7 giving us Eb7:

This podcast features a rather nice chord lick applying these techniques:

The lick is based on a I - vi - ii - V progression in Bb with a number of substitutions:

Bbma7 is changed to Bb6. The fundamental part of the chord is Bb major, extensions such as 6th, 7th , 9th etc are just additional notes to add colour to the chord.

We can also apply chord quality substitutions to Gm7 and Cm7 turning them into dominant 7ths.

We could now substitute dominant 7th chords a tritone (b5th) above the G7 and C7 giving us Db7 and Gb7:

It is actually possible to include another chord quality substitution this time to Gb7, making it Gbma7. This creates another colour to the progression yet it still retains its original intention:

All the other alterations within the lick are extensions such as 9ths etc.

The best way to get familiar with these techniques and the sounds they can produce is to apply them to progressions and songs you know and to experiment.

See you next time.