JazzGuitarLessons.net, improve your jazz guitar playing with a real teacher. My name is Marc here, and welcome to a podcast where we'll tackle some of the most basic chord substitutions that take place in the blues jazz progression. So let's get going. Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists to learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way.
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So this has been running. Actually, I wonder if the word podcast is, the way we could call it. Actually, it's just me giving audio lessons. I'm the founder and, you know, the main guy on this website, the main teacher on jazz guitar lessons learned since 2009. So we're on, so we celebrated our 10th year, actually a few months ago.
So welcome to this podcast. if you're not familiar with the way we work, I have my guitar in hand here, and I'll walk you through some of the basic, the basic substitutions that take care of that takes place. Sorry, once again, and say the B-flat blues. You know, in the context of jazz, we often do this in B-flat.
And just as a little refresher, the B-flat chord progression, the main chords that there's B-flat, I'm playing a 13th here and E-flat, I'm playing a nine and back to B-flat. And somewhere along the lines there, it's going to be a G7, some sort the sixth chord, and then C minor, something C minor, nine to F, in fact B5.
So actually it's a good old 251. Back to the B-flat. And the way we organize chord substitutions in the context of jazz is twofold. The first opportunity you have to build different, substitutions is actually to add more two fives where the are chord changes. and we're going to explore this a little bit later. And the second way to do this is simply chord by chord, and use our good old, you know, the, tritone sub.
You know that that's one of the tricks that every player needs to have in their trick bag. And I'm going to start with the latter, actually, we're going to start talking about how to employ tritone subs over B-flat blues because it's super easy. And so long as you understand your destination and meaning the chord you're going to, you can do, chord substitutions in the snap like this.
So I hope you hear that snap! And the recording. Actually, I was making an effort to make it really loud. So here we are. You need to think of the blues form in four different sections of four bars. So the first section is actually B-flat seven. Some people call it a quick change down to four and back to B-flat seventh for bar three and bar four.
So that's I call this the first section of four bars. And I call this, you know, bars one through four, one, two, three and four, the second so-called section. And you should see separately in your mind's eye this other set of four bars, it's going to four, it's going to do the E-flat chord. And E-flat will last for two bars.
In this case, optionally we have passing E diminished chord. Let's not include it today. So that's four bar five bar six and then bar seven. We have the B-flat again and bar eight, which is the last of our second section. We have a G7 or so-called six chord or a six dominant chord. So this is the second section.
So the second batch of four bars, namely bars four, sorry, five, six, seven and eight. And comes the last four bars where we could say this turnaround. So bar nine we get the two chord C minor seven, bar ten, we get a five chord and F7, and we're back to B-flat. Some people at this point will run a a turnaround of some sort.
Could be this or it could be you could be different. But in bars 11 and 12, people will do something that brings back the one chord, the big one at the top. All right. So that being said, I want to talk about the tritone sub and the best places to do it are the points where you have this change to a new section.
So if you look at the first four bars, it's in the area of what we call the one, you know, Roman number one, the B-flat. And bar five are going to four. So the best place to put a natural tritone. So this right before you get the four which would be in this case bar four. yeah.
So but the chord four happens in bar five and right before bar five. So in that last part of the first section you, you can have to try it on some, namely that chord. This is an E nine. And it will go down by a half step to to the four chord to the E-flat. Right. And what's interesting here is, I guess a lot of students ask me market A, how can I substitute so I can play these crazy lines on blues and how can I change course for one another?
So if if you approach this in that way, meaning that you get a chord symbol and you could altogether just remove that chord symbol, put another one, it's not going to work. You need to explore the context of it and see where it's the easiest to hear and use. And namely that's bar four. So let me just play the example to get it in your ears.
I'm going to do this in four to the floor style. So four on the floor I guess you say 1234 B-flat, E-flat, B-flat to an E. There you go. So that E natural is actually a tracked on sub from B-flat. Substituted over a B-flat means that it's actually a trident. so there's two interesting observations here.
Number one is that notice we have an E natural and we are going down to an E-flat. So it's only a half step up destination. And that's why I wanted to cover this one first. And because it's so easy once you know your destination, you just go have, you know, a fret up on the guitar, literally. And this going to be at any iteration of your E could be this could be whatever, you know.
And that's the first observation. Second observation is if you look at the notes of that E natural seven E7 chord, in the context of being a B-flat root, you're going to tell me, Marc, you're just playing your B-flat altered. And that's the key to it, is that's your first vein of chord substitution. It's not necessarily to set to substitute this for something crazy, like we're here and go here or go play crazy things.
