THEORY OF THE MONTH
Welcome! Ready for some cool theory to lift your spirits in these strange times? As many of you will already know, we tend to employ Lydian Dominant over dom7#11 chords, as its construction is 1, 2,. But, and it’s a big but, we don’t always encounter chord symbols which capture every extension unique to the mode which we may choose to employ. This means that we often need an understanding of a chord’s function relative to the harmony in order to come up with suitable, harmonically ‘correct’ choices. We’ve looked at tritone substitution in past issues, but just to recap, we can substitute a resolving dominant for a dominant chord a tritone away. Dmin7, G7, Cmaj () could now become Dmin7, D b 7, Cmaj (). This gives us chromatically descending root movement and is a harmonic technique that is in widespread use.
