Chord Substitutions – And How To Use Them

Years ago, I wrote a book called The Acoustic Guitar Chord Book, a reference companion to my Acoustic Guitar Method and Acoustic Guitar Fingerstyle Method. My wife was profoundly bullish on the project, convinced as she was of the popularity of the concept. "Everyone needs a chord book," she observed. "My first guitar book was a Happy Traum chord dictionary!"

I personally had never owned a chord book, making me perhaps an odd candidate for the gig. Still, I plowed ahead, buoyed by Ms. Fretboard's conviction that this was the project to make the family's fortune – or at least pay for a few rounds of fish tacos somewhere along the way. In fact, writing that book only convinced me of what I already suspected: it's not enough to learn more chords.  You need to learn where to use them, and how to incorporate them into the things you already know how to do.

Because the blues is based on a seemingly finite situation – twelve bars (maybe eight or sixteen), three chords (maybe four or five if you're getting fancy) – it sure seems like you could brighten things up by throwing some additional chords into the mix. But which chords, why, and how?

"Chord substitutions" is just the idea of swapping in different chords for the usual ones, or adding additional chords to the existing progression. If that sounds like the possibilities could be sort of endless, you're right. So for this workshop, I've narrowed the options down to a dozen of the most important, frequently-encountered moves so you can really get your hands and brain around them in short order.

Not only that – I've designed the material to make it as simple and logical as possible for you to fold each potential idea into your playing as quickly as possible, by organizing them as two-measure ideas you can immediately drop into a particular moment in the blues progression.

More specifically, for every two bars of the blues in E, we'll look at two different ways to navigate those bars. You'll wind up with twelve fully tabbed-out examples, each incorporating one particular chord substitution idea into a completely playable two-bar steady bass lick. All the examples are designed to fit with each other, so while I'm not one hundred percent on the math, I'm pretty sure that gives you a total of 64 ways to play through the blues in E before you start to repeat yourself, and that's just if you stick to the examples in this workshop.

Why a live workshop?

I've been doing in depth live streams for over a year as part of my monthly membership, The Fingerstyle Five, and on my Youtube channel, and the ones on chord voicings and chord substitutions have routinely been among the most popular. The live stream format combines a concentrated amount of material on a specific topic with an interactive, Q&A environment that lets you get your specific questions answered while the workshop is still going on. Before this workshop starts, you'll have a PDF with notation and tab of each example I'm going to teach, so you can focus on watching and learning, knowing the note-for-note specifics are already in your hands. The whole two hours will be archived for later replay, so you'll be able to watch anything you want again for the next three months. And I'll pause at regular intervals to take questions via chat, to clear up aspects of the material that are still unclear.