To add further interest to a solo, musicians will often
employ chord substitutes. The most common place to use them is when you have a
perfect dominant seven chord leading to its tonic Major chord such as C7
followed by its tonic F Major. How much you use substitutes is a matter of
personal taste.
Chord substitutes
commonly used are based on the flat five, the augmented (+5), the flat nine, and
the minor seven of the perfect dominant seven chord you are substituting. So
for a C7 chord that would give us the chord substitutes F#, Ab, Db, and Bb
minor respectively. The F#, Ab, and Db would be major triads while the Bb minor
would be a minor triad, obviously. Notice that these substitutes share many of
the same notes. To begin with just use the triads and approach the substitute
with a chord tone that is a half step or whole step from the chord leading to
the substitute to a chord tone of the substitute. Once you get used to using
them you can mix the substitutes together or you can even just imply a
substitute by using one or two notes of the substitute.
This new format for the Google blog does not work very well
for me. I can no longer add links or upload scans the way I used to, and for
that I apologize, so from now on this will all be in text form. I am also
unable to order my posts in the way I have in the past, that’s progress I
guess. So if you are a first time visitor if you go to the About This Site post
you will see all the other posts will be in order with the earliest posts
first. All my subsequent posts will now be in reverse order. Again I apologize for
this.
