JazzGuitarLessons.net, improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher. Welcome to the podcast where we will outline chord synonyms. So let's get going with the podcast. Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Marc, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy French accent, make sure to subscribe.
What do we have as far as chord synonyms? We're not looking at chords substitutions, but basically what we could say is learning a different chord, voicing for every chord quality for every single chord and every single key can become overwhelming. So in this podcast, what I want to share is ways to repurpose things you already know through that that power of synonyms.
And I have to make a little joke, because, you know, being a man of my generation, I saw a tweet, which I'm sure you can trace back with someone shared a picture of cinnamon rolls, and she mistakenly or auto corrected, I just made synonym rolls, right? And shared a picture on Twitter. And of course someone smart commented cinnamon rolls just like grandma used to make, which is an amazing play on the word.
I love play on words, I love wordplay. so basically getting back to the jazz here, I want to take things from C root because, you know, this is for learning purposes. And look at how a certain C chord. So we'll cover C major chord for instance, or C minor seven plus five chord. And how this C chord means something else.
So it's not literally in the sense of looking at a piece of sheet music and going, hey, I see a C major seven. What else can I put in its place? That would be chord substitution. What we're doing is we're not doing chord substitution. We're looking at chord synonyms or chords re spelling. So let's dig in. First I want to talk about a C major seven chord and see how it could be used.
I have my guitar here C major seven in the third bar displaying these C, G, B and E right. And one is the easiest way. And I got an email this morning from someone I forgot the name of the visitors. Like oh yeah, that's third trick. So if you go down the third CB a and you look at the key is A minor, which is the relative minor, you will you will find that there's a all the notes are common in between.
So a good idea would be to look at C that note as being the third of a minor seventh chord. And furthermore what we can do is take all the notes of C major seven, which is C, E, G, and B, and repurpose them to think and think of them as coming from any chord. So I'm playing an open A, and I'm playing C, and I'm playing E, I'm playing G, and I'm playing B, which means I'm effectively playing this shape, but I'm using an opener.
The result is A minor and nine because those four notes once again C, E, G and are flat three, five, flat seven and nine, meaning that all the chord notes of C major seven are contained within the A minor nine chord, meaning also that if you see a minor nine on a piece of sheet music, that's where you're required to play.
Instead of scratching your head and going, oh, I have to find, oh, that's an E minor nine to find a shape for a minor nine, you can always repurpose any of the C major seven chords that you know, especially if you started to learn your inversions like this. You know, you learn different ways you can put your C major chord on the fretboard and then use that.
Just use C major seven, where A minor seven is required. So I'll do just that. Right now I'll play my open A. And this is not a song, you know this is just a vampire. I'm like, okay, we're playing on a minor and I'm going to play shapes. I know for the C major seven containing only these four notes that right, here we go.
It works right.
There you go. Or even discard.
Good. So that was pretty easy, right? So that's the sound of my mouse on my desk here. So that's your first chord synonym. So remember now there's a formula to this. Naturally you could practice this in different keys and going if you see a minor chord and it's called for with the ninth extension or at any time you see a minor chord, you could always go a third down and go, I want to play the chord that is, sorry, a third up, a third up.
Yeah. And I want to play the chord on there on that third. That is a major seven. Chances are, you know, more major stuff than, you know. Minor stuff is just the nature of how music has been built. So you can really repurpose. let me grab another example in a different key just to mess with your head a little bit.
So what if we talk about G. e minor seven another open e so open E e minor seven of some sort. Well, you go up to the G chord and then you say, well, if I want to hear E minor nine sounds, I will play G major seven chords and it could sound something like this. I'm going to repeat that, that exercise I just did.
So.
Even this guy and it works because effectively it's three, five, seven and nine of your minor nine chord. All right. So that's it for how to repurpose a C major seven chord. Now let me dig into something a little more complicated as a second example. A third example will go even more complicated where there's multiple facets, a multi-pronged approach with a diminished chord.
But example two how about C minor seven flat five. You know that half diminished chord. So if you take this in your third fret or C G flat, B flat and E flat, remember we were here. All we did is take these three notes that down a half step and we have this chord. And that's a chord that typically beginners of people will play jazz and see this on a triangle.
Yuck. I don't want to play that chord. I don't know what it is. I don't know how it's supposed to sound. I don't know shapes for that guy. So I'm like, I'm desperate and I will just hang on for dear life and strum this and hope no one notices. But let's repurpose this by the same. By the same trick as we've done.
We went down and we considered what if C was a third of a minor seven? Now we're asking the same question. C minor 755. What if that C note was a third of something, and that something could be, for example, a flat dominant chord. So go a flat C. So effectively we have C as the third B flat as a fifth, G flat as a seventh and B flat as a nine.
So 3579 of an E-flat chord. So it's an E-flat blues, right? And now we're saying, how does A-flat blues in the key of a flat or in a different key, which calls for any flat dominant chord? How does this relate back to C minor seven flat five? Well, we've just done the legwork just now. You go and start with your C and those four notes are repurposed.
So let me I will I don't want to spend too much time on this because if you got the first example you will get this one same idea. Let me play the blues in the key of E-flat, and we know we play E-flat, and then we go to A-flat, back to E-flat, and in bar five, where we were supposed to go to the E-flat chord.
I'm going to avoid this voicing this typical light jazz A-flat 13 chord. I'm going to play a C of seven flat five chord, just so you you realize that your ears will totally pick up on it. You're already losing E-flat. Now I want a two and two E flat blues.
Here's our C minor seven, five five.
Wasn't that bad, right? It.
Let me do another round.
And we'll hear C Morrison's last five.
And.
Something like that. So you see A-flat seven or A-flat nine was called four. And I substituted a chord synonym list even if it's not a verb chord. Synonyms into C minor seven flat five. Good. Notice we sort of skipped. We went from C major seven. In example one to C minor, some flat five. You could use C minor, C minor, not flat five to C minor seven, and say that this is the third of A-flat major seven.
You'd have to find a context in which you can do the example, but it's, it's hard on a podcast not to have your open strings and what not to demonstrate. Chord vamps and such, but it could be something you decide to work on. Just go a third up. Or in case if you start with a C minor and go a third down and go, what's that chord?
And you can synonym. Is it synonym? Sorry. that must be the cold medication talking maybe. Hey guys, real quick, if you're enjoying this episode so far and you're interested in taking your just playing to the next level, please reach out to us. We've helped thousands of guitarists improvise on standards at a level they didn't even think was possible.
So link in description or visit jazz guitar lessons dot net to start today. Okay, back to the episode. All right. Third example where I said we will cover diminished stuff. So let's pick C diminished seven. So c d flat B double flat. So an and harmonically this is an angel. Any flat. You know this sound right. It's the sound of the lady tied on a train tracks in a silent movie.
So this chord is interesting and it's pretty mind boggling because it can be substituted for for. I keep saying substitute, I mean synonyms, but whatever and synonym is not even a verb. It could be for different things because of its constant structure. It's a symmetrical structure that the diminished seventh chord is. So it could act as four different seven flat nine chords.
And then we'll start by just saying, if you don't get the theory of this, go to the jazz theory section of jazz guitar since last night. There's plenty. Or you can send me an email mark at Jazz Dance and that always a pleasure. and the four diminished the four, seven flat nine chords that are, also synonyms.
We see them as seven are chords which have this as their fifth, third, fifth, flat seven and flat nine. So the cap I will start with the easiest one, the C diminished seven is a third of a flat seven flat nine, which we've already covered. We've talked about that relationship here. And what's interesting is a flat seven. Flat nine can be thought of in A25 in the key of D-flat.
So major, all of a sudden we're talking about a C chord and we have a D flat major key coming up around what what's going on with this. So let me let me play the example for you. If we are in the key of D flat major. Right. The two five will be E flat minor seven. Flat five.
The flat seven. Something that the D-flat major. And now if we take that C7 diminished shape, I guarantee you I can strum that chord. Especially if a bass player is taking care of of the root. that you can play that and it will act as your five, as your A flat seven. So E flat a flat. And then let me do another round with our C diminished and.
C that was C diminished seven. It worked again E flat minor seven eight. So it it's so tense that C diminished seven. And it wants to resolve here. But the beauty of it is it's so tense that it will resolve in four different locations, which is the magic of it. And the four different locations are all aligned in minor third.
So it will resolve in the key of D flat. We'll resolve in the key of E natural. It will result in the key of G natural will resolve the key of B-flat. Strange, so let me do another example. I will do it. I've done D-flat here. I will do it in B-flat. So the two five, one, the the key of B-flat major is C minor.
Seven F7 or F 13. Right. So let me do that little vamp again. So I'm going to play actually strum on my guitar C minor seven I'm going to strum C diminished seven down to B-flat major. And if you got a basis that's got your back, you're totally fine with this. You're ready. 1 to 2 B flat to five.
It.
Again C minor seven. See the seven. So remember our C diminished seventh here acted as an escort. It acted as the five of B-flat. Remember I told you it's parallel symmetrical. So it means you can resolve this to the four keys. Just maybe jot it down and convince yourself later that C diminished seven can be used as an F7 flat nine a flat seven.
Flat nine, D daddy D7 flat nine, and B as in Bobby b7, flat nine, F A, flat D and B, and that's just the nature of the diminished chord. So you see, in fact, learning jazz often as beginners, we think there's more stuff and more stuff and more stuff. Yeah, you need to learn more songs. You need to gain more experience.
That's the fact. But then we realized that we basically always play the same 3 or 4 shapes or 3 or 4 qualities. We just repurpose the way the sounds because of the context therein. So that's one of the big key lessons, of learning to play jazz accompaniment, playing jazz guitar and understanding harmony is it's not oh, this is it.
It's like, okay, wait, I'm playing something, but what else could this be? It could always be 4 or 5 different things. So in this podcast today we talked about C playing C major seven. That's the thing C minor seventh flat five and C diminished seven. And for from these three shapes we extracted six possibilities which is amazing because it's it's really expensive and expensive with an A not expensive as in money.
So you realize that we could have I could have gone further with this. I just did my tool to go look a third down. Oh, we were going a third down and we realized it's something else of something else of something else. And it's repurposed. So for any or all chord shapes that you know, it could be, regardless of what the shape is, it could be 3 or 4 different things.
Always, always, always. And you know, we have our piece or we have our favorites, our voicings. I play all the time that it seems. I play them over every song, but they're never in the same place and they never mean the same thing. But ultimately it's because, of course, synonyms. All right, I know it was it theory heavy lesson.
So thank you for joining. Really glad to have you here. Please do let me know if you have any questions, comments or complaints, mostly in the comments form below this podcast and feel free to reach out if you have, topics that you'd like to have covered on the podcast. It's a really, really fun and easy way for me to do lessons, which is I sit down with my microphone in my pajamas and my guitar and, I just, you know, shoot a topic and I don't really need to make sheet music for it because I know you guys are listening to this on the bus or walking the dogs, or let me know and
I will see you in the next podcast. Take care.
