SUBSTITUTE

WITH RICHARD BARRETT

THOUGH this isn’t a term you hear used every day,‘drop 2’chords are a simple but extremely effective way to add more variety into both your chordal accompaniment and to spice up your lead playing. If it’s good enough for Eric Johnson, then surely it’s good enough for us! In the never-ending quest to find a new twist on some of the more common guitar chord voicings (or even some more outlandish ones, come to think of it), we’ve already covered how swapping the bass note with one of the higher notes in the chord can dramatically change its character, especially when put into musical context. With this in mind, in today's Substitute we’ll take the second to highest note of certain chord triads, and simply drop it to the bottom. What happens when we do this is that we create some wide-voiced chord triads based on, in this case, C Major, D Major, E Minor and F#m7b5. Check out the chord boxes below.