SUBSTITUTE Anyone For Seconds?

One of the obvious ways to make a chord more interesting is to add notes to it. An interesting new chord can be a great starting point for fresh inspiration. But adding notes to a whole progression is a bit daunting. You might get one chord sounding great, but then it won’t work with the next chord any more!

That might be because you don’t understand how a given note functions in relation to the chord; some notes (especially 4ths) can be quite disruptive to the progression. But one note is usually a safe bet, and that’s the 2nd, lying a whole tone above the root. You have two choices. You can either add it to a regular Major or Minor chord, or you can use it to replace the 3rd, keeping things simple. We’ll use both approaches with this tired old progression above…

So, our first chord was A Major, which is built from the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the A Major scale (A-C#-E). We’re now going to replace the 3rd with the 2nd (B), which is known as a ‘suspended 2nd’, hence the chord name of Asus2. The notes are now A-B-E.

For the E chord, we’ll simply add the 2nd (F#) to the existing E Major chord (E-G#-B). In this case, the 2nd is called the 9th (it’s a music theory thing), so the resulting chord is called an ‘add9’.

Now we come to a crucial difference between sus2 and add9 chords. Even though we started here with F#m (F#-A-C#), we’ve ended up with F#sus2 (F#- G#- C#). By replacing the 3rd with the 2nd, we remove the Major/Minor distinction, therefore sus2 chords are neither Major nor Minor.

This is the same process as chord 2, adding the 2nd (E) to the existing Major triad (D-F#-A). For variety, we’ve positioned the chord with the root on the sixth string, so you get to learn a different shape. These add9 shapes are quite a stretch, so take care!