Jazz Guitar Lessons • Chord Substitution.

More Jazz guitar lessons:

• Jazz Guitar Lessons • Misty

• Jazz Guitar Lessons • When Sunny Gets Blue (Chord Chart, Melody, Chord Progression)

• Jazz Guitar Lessons • What A Wonderful World

Below is a standard 12 bar, 3 chord blues progression in G. The simplest form of this is: the I (one) chord for 4 bars the IV (four) chord for 2, back to the I for 2 bars, the V (five) chord for 1, the IV chord for one, then the turnaround (the last 2 bars of the progression). This progression contains 'the quick change', that is, the chords move from the I shape to the IV shape in the second bar. The turnaround is simply the I chord to the V chord. The movement is always to the V chord, if you are 'turning around' and going back to the start. If you are at the end, the turnaround returns to the I chord. Normally, as in this example, the chords are all 7ths. Use Gm Pentatonic to improvise over this.

With embellishment, we can give the progression more of an 'uptown sound'. The 7ths have been replaced by 9ths and 13ths. The 'quick change' is still in place and the turnaround has been elaborated to I to IV, back to I then to V. As long as there is no altered chords,( that is, the chords contain no sharps or flats), this progression can be played over top of the above progression and the same scale ( Gm Pentatonic) can be used for the entire piece.

Finally, this is a complete overhaul of the standard chords. I have substituted Gm7 and Gm6 for the original C7, and Am7 and Am6 for the D7. This is a standard jazz substitution for the IV and V chord and sounds great! The G7 in bars 7 and 8 have been replaced by another standard jazz progression found in many songs: GMaj7, Am7, Bm7, Bbm7. For these chords switch to the G major scale (or more precisely, G Ionian), but be careful with the Bbm7 if the tempo is slow. I usually move into an arpeggio at this point. Try Gm Pentatonic over the first 6 bars, move into G Ionian or G Major Pentatonic for the next 3 then back to Gm or G Dorian for the next bar. For the turnaround, return to G Ionian or G Major Pentatonic. Or better yet, arpeggiate the chords.