Chord Substitutions Made Easy... Kind Of.

Last week, we dove into color chords to spice up our plain-ole triads—and now we're going to take you through the wonderful world of chord substitutions. If you know how to use this concept the right way, it opens you up to an entirely new world of harmony, textures, and colors within the sound of your worship team.

This subject can wade into the thick weeds of theory, but no worry—we'll make it as super simple as we can. 

Let's dive in!

What Is Chord Substitution?

The easiest way to think about chord substitution is that you use one chord to highlight the extensions of a different chord. (See this article on extensions here.) In a band setting, this usually means that guitars, especially electrics, will play the "top" chord while the bass instrument covers the root of the original chord. (Pianists can do this by themselves, with the top chord played in the right hand and the left hand covering the root.)

So let's say you want to play an Em to Cmaj7, but your part requires you to just play a few notes at a time, like a funky electric rhythm part. You don't want to lose the energy of your syncopated, driving rhythms, so your movement needs to be minimal. Here are the notes of each chord:

• Em: E–G–B

• Cmaj7: C–E–G–B

Here, all you need to do is, well—keep playing the Em chord! It shares the same notes as the Cmaj7, and a bass instrument can cover the root, allowing you to play without changing grips or shapes. (This can sound really smooth!) So in effect, you're collectively playing an Em/C.

Digging Further: Altered Dominant Chords

Let's take this approach into a deeper space, where we can use chords that have more dissonance built into them to heighten our tension and resolution, especially if you're looking to use a gospel-style approach to your playing. This will chiefly deal with dominant seventh chords and altered extensions.

Just to cover our bases: Altered extensions are variations of what we talked about in this article, except we raise or lower the pitches by a half step. So we get these tones:

• ♭9

• ♯ 9

• ♯ 11 (♭5)

• ♭13 (♯ 5)—the natural 13 also works here in some cases

These are really only used over dominant seventh chords, and they add a high degree of tension that lends itself to a very satisfying resolution. The thing is, it's hard to play all these juicy notes at once along with the root of the chord, so we have to pick which notes to play. To do this, we simply adapt our approach of Cmaj7 = Em/C to a new formula: altered dominant = diminished chord/another root note.

The way this works is you can use a fully diminished seventh chord over another root note to get some of the altered extensions PLUS the essential tones of the target chord. So let's try this over a C7 with altered extensions. Here are the notes we can play:

• C7 with altered extensions: C–E–G–B♭–D♭–E♭–F♯–A♭(or A♮) = 1–3–5–♭7–♭9–♯ 9–♯ 11–♭13–♮13

If we superimpose an Edim7 over the C root, much like we did with Em/C, we get this:

• Edim7: E–G–B♭–D♭ = (over C) 3–5–♭7–♭9

So in effect, we can play Edim7 while the bass instrument covers C to get all the tones of a C7♭9.

The Tritone Substitution

If you want to add an even jazzier flair to your sound, you can use what's called the tritone substitution, where play a dominant seventh chord 6 half steps away from the original dominant seventh chord, resulting in a very cool chromatic motion when resolved. On paper, it would look like this:

• Dm7–G7–C = Dm7–D♭7–C

The reason why this works is that, much like how we shared tones in the last two examples, the G7 and D♭7 share tones, too:

• G7: G–B–D–F

• D♭7: D♭–F–A♭–C♭(same as B)

So when we play a D♭7 in place of a G7, our ear still hears the same function that G7 was performing, leading us to the resolution on C. So the notes of a D♭7, when heard functioning as a G7, are as follows:

• D♭7: D♭(♭5)–F(♭7)–A♭(♭9), C♭ or B(3)

TL;DR

All in all, to get more interesting sounds, you need to explore ways of reusing what you already know (existing chords) in new ways (substituting for other chords while retaining the original essence and function). Your favorite players aren't do anything special other than exploring their application of knowledge to a deeper level—which is something you have within you to do! 

So spend some time digging into the theory mentioned above, internalize it, and apply it. You've got this!

Be blessed 👊✌️