In the first installment of this series, you recall we were challenged to begin with a song, or at least a chord progression. Once we have our basic song in mind, we can now move on to the real creative process. Or, to state it a bit more hep, "we gonna mess with it, and lay down some mojo."
One of the first steps I always follow when creating is to try out chord substitutions. Substituting alternate chords for those in the base progression will yield new harmonies that will point to new melodies and ideas. (I won't promise you that you will always like them! But, it will open up ideas, and let your ears be your guide.)
Chord substitution involves playing extensions, inversions, or totally different chords in place of the basic chord in a progression. (Look out!!! Here comes some theory!!) Here's the basic concept: Take a simple Cmaj7 chord. It is composed of these notes: C, E, G, B. Take a close look at those notes. If you start on the E, and build a triad using the same notes from the C chord, you get E, G, B. Recognize that? That is an Em chord! What that means is, the Cmaj7 chord, (the root chord in the C scale), contains an Em chord "inside". This means you can substitute an Em chord for a C chord in tunes written in C, and it will usually sound "ok". It will definitely sound different, because your putting a minor in place of a major sound. But, none of the notes are "wrong", or chromatic.
This process can be extended to other chords in a given scale. In general, the following substitutions will work.
- I = iii = vi (The I chord, aka the "root", can be substituted with a minor 3rd, (the iii), or the minor 6th, (the vi), which is the relative minor to the scale.....)
- IV = ii (The minor 2nd chord can be substituted for the major 4th in a given scale)
- V = vii (The 7 chord can be substituted for the dominant 7th (the V7) chord)
There are lots of tutorials on chord substitution on the web, and elsewhere. But they all follow a basic recipe. If you look closely at any chord in a scale, especially an extended chord, (one with four notes in it), you will find other "relative" chords, (or triads), buried in it. Just like our C -> Em example above, this can be done with other chords from any base scale. (Remember the importance of knowing what key you're playing in?!?!) Try any of the following resources for more on scale theory and chord substitution. And, keep reading below for details on how I used chord substituting to create an original "masterpiece", and some practical advice on how to find your own substitution possibilities.
- Google "chord substitution"
- Here's a nice write up on "musician's math" that I've relied on frequently
- Head over to MusicDispatch to find books on chord theory, and chord substitutions
)), by right-clicking here, and selecting "Save As" to your computer.Grace & Harmonics is an acoustic melody I recorded using Band In The Box as a backing track. G&H started out as a simple I, IV, V, I chord progression, and morphed into the final tune using a number of various chord substitution techniques. For the base, let's assume a simple I, IV, V, I progression in G. The basic chord progression looks like this:
G | G | C | C | D | C | G | G
This is a simple 8 bar progression in G, and is exactly how I started out. Depending on your phrasing, and your strum pattern, this same progression can be heard in thousands of modern songs. If you want to have a little fun, go to the YouTube recording of Grace & Harmonics, and just play this simple chord progression along with the video. It works, I promise you!!
Starting from this simple I, IV, V, I progression, I began looking around for chords I could substitute at various places. The first one was simple. Starting with the beginning G chord, I extended the first G by adding the A, making a Gadd9. That made the first two bars, Gadd9 - > G. All right, good enough for a start. But what about that C, or IV chord starting in the 3rd measure?
Here I started trying various things to hear how they would sound. I tried an Am at first, because it was the relative minor to C. Or, in the G major scale, Am is the ii, which is a good substitute candidate for the IV chord. (Remember our "musician's math" from up above??) This gives a very pretty melody, and one I recommend you try. Try this for fun. (You can just "cowboy" chord it if you like....)
G | G | Am | Am | D | C | G | G
Pretty, eh? It takes that boring ol' I, IV, V, I progression, and gives it a whole new life. Try this over some of your favorite songs in G. It will always work although, depending on the song, you may not like the new "flavor" it gives it.
In my case, I was working in the 3rd, and 5th position. So, the chords I had so far looked like this.
Gadd9 | G | Am | Em7 | ......
Try that out. Hear how it sounds? Can you hear how it compares to the base I, IV progression from the original?
Along the way, I had flirted with an Em9 chord in place of the Em7. But, it was really too dark to "home" on. However, I thought it might make a good "passing" chord. After fiddling a bit more, I settled in on the first four measures of the resulting song. Here they are in tab form. (Right-click and download the image if you need to enlarge it for readability.)
Check out the fourth measure, and you'll see how I used the Em9 as a "passing" chord to the Em7. And what happened to our Am in the third measure? If you look carefully, you'll see that the first chord in the third measure is actually a Cmaj7, and the second chord is technically an Am7. This illustrates two things. First, the concept of a "passing" chord or tone. In this case, the Cmaj7 is really just a passing tone I'm using to give the melody movement. (Who wants to just listen to someone strumming chords every beat??) Second, this really illustrates the concept of chord substitution as you can plainly see that the Cmaj7 and the Am7 basically have the exact same notes in them. That's why the substitution works here! And, hopefully you can see how I use this as a composition technique. It's rooted in music theory, and can be kind of deep. But a simple way to think about it is, look at any chord you're playing and think about what other chords you could create that have basically the same shape, or use basically the same notes. Any time you come up with something like that, you've just found a possible substitution. The purpose of learning some theory is, it will help you by giving you some guidelines for where to look to find even more substitutions you can use.
Ok, so far, we've transformed this:
G | G | C | C
into this.
Gadd9 | G | Cmaj7 Am7 | Em9 Em7
Pretty slick, eh? And, now we've got the rudiments of a melody taking shape. So, where do we take it next? I started by tinkering with the D chord, (the next chord in the base progression). Since I was in the 5th position, it was natural to go up to the 7th position for the D. Also, I had some movement going up the high E string so far, so I was thinking it would be nice to walk the melody back down the high E some how. Again, tinkering around a bit, I hit on the idea illustrated in bars 5 and 6 below. (Again, right-click and download if you need to enlarge.)
You can see the Dmaj7 is the first chord in the 5th measure there. The remainder of the 5th measure is just a walk-down to the C for measure six. It's argueable whether this is "chord substituting" or just "melody creation." You should note that the Dmaj7 to the Bm7 on the 9th fret is a major to relative minor, as is the Dbmaj7 to the Bbm7 on the 8th fret, and the Cmaj7 to Am7 (again) on the 7th fret. Again, these major to relative minor chords share all the same notes, so they sound fine when substituted for each other. Here, I'm using all this to create a melody on the high E string. (For more on chord melodies, see some of my other articles.....) Noodle it around yourself until you get a handle on it.
So now we've transformed the basic I, IV, V, I progression into a
Gadd9 | G | Cmaj7 Am7 | Em9 Em7 | Dmaj7 Bm7 | Cmaj7 Am7 | Bm11 Gmaj7 | Gmaj7 |
To see those last two subs, look at the 7th and 8th bars of the tab above. Remember, Bm is the minor third of the G scale. That's where I came up with that Bm11 idea. Remember I = iii = iv. I tried substituting some Bm chords for the G until I found one I liked. In this case, it actually formed a basis for the melody that was emerging. And that last Gmaj7 is just the good ol' root.
So that's it for my invention. Along the way, I played around with the phrasing, added some straight melody notes in the 6th and 8th bars to help polish the melody, and "discovered" a measure of 2/4 at the end of the verse phrase to add flavor. But, the bulk of the effort was in searching out those chord substitutions to develop the progression. In this case, I relied on substituting extensively to create an entire song. However, you can do this in any portion of a progression, or song, in order to add flavor and/or movement to an otherwise staid, or dull segment.
Now it's your turn. Remember, start with a progression in mind. Then study the basics of scale theory, with an eye toward picking chords to substitute for the base chords. It's usually easy to start out by just adding extensions to the existing chords. Throw on some +2s, or 9s, or sus2 / sus4. Try changing one note in a chord and see what you get. If you like it, keep it! If it barks like a duck, try something else. Then, move on to substituting other chords for those in the base progression and see what happens. Try playing the relative minor in place of a major chord. Try substituting a minor ii-nd for a major IV-th, etc., etc. And, don't just substitute the boring base chords either! Throw in a minor iiadd9 for a major IV-th. See how it sounds. Finally, when you have some chords you like, try adding some passing tones, or other ideas to create some movement in the progression. Before you know it, you'll have your own progression, and a wealth of knowledge around possible chord substitutions for other solos, etc, that you'll be doing in the future. Rock on!!!
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