9. Common Chord Substitutions
Well, this blog was going to dive deeper into cadences and turnarounds, but upon reviewing my last few blogs, I noticed I had more to explaining about the relationships between functional harmony and common chord substitutions. So, here we go.
Following Functional Harmony
As we have discovered, functional harmony plays a very important roll in chord substitutions. In the last blog (Substitute!) we discussed substituting chords by borrowing from the parallel minor and other parallel modes. In the table below, we have seven of the major keys listed with the chords grouped by harmonic function. Also, we show the common borrowed chords from the parallel minor keys and a few from parallel modes all grouped by functions. I also included a download link if you would like a PDF of this table.
Using functional harmony to find chord substitutions for your songs is more akin to painting with chords. That is, we look at function as “color” or “feel” that a given movement between chords and the placement of each chord in a progression adds to a verse, chorus, or bridge.
So in the YouTube video linked below, the folks at FretJam give us some good audio and visual examples of using the parallel minor chords for substitutions, when they are commonly used, and how they sound.
Melody and Borrowed Chords
Why all this talk about borrowed chords? Well it opens up new opportunities for the melody of your song to incorporate notes outside the key of your song. For instance, in the video from Fretjam linked above, one thing they show is how you would adapt the scale for the parallel minor mode to play over the borrowed chord. What they are really talking about is by substituting a chord outside the primary song key, you have additional choices to build your melody. This really opens up how you can shape you melodies or find the chords that best carry your melody. This is very freeing for creativity. It’s going from the kindergarten 8-pack of Crayolas to the big-kid 64-pack with the sharpener!!! Lots of colors to hang on the fridge.
In Table above, I only showed you seven major keys and some chord substitutions from the parallel minor and a couple other parallel modes. You can find chord substations for any key major or minor and by using functional harmony, it will help you more easily discover which chords will work smoothly. Of course, we always say the rules in music theory are really more like guidelines, this is true for chord substitutions too.
Where all of this really gets to be a never ending resource is when you start adding extensions to the chords by incorporating 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th in your chords.
Closing
In this blog we looked deeper into the role functional harmony plays in helping you discover chord substitutions. We also discussed how exploring chord substitutions opens up endless opportunities to build your melody and enhance the emotional impact of your lyrics and song.
At some point in the blog series you started thinking, Joe, this is too much to keep in my head. Well, in preparing for this blog I realized that I should have introduced the Circle of Fifths a few blogs ago. The Circle of Fifths one of the most powerful tools in music and it has been around a long time. So look for my next blog in June for the one diagram to rule them all.
Cheers!
