In this easy jazz guitar chord lesson, you will learn about jazz chord substitution and the III-VI-II-V-I chord progression. The lesson uses most of the chord voicings from last week’s lesson on beginner jazz chords, but we use some of them as chord substitutions to get different sounds or tonalities.
Many chord shapes in jazz guitar can be more than one chord. For example, a Db7 chord can also be a G7 with a flatted 5th. Realizing this is one of the foundations of understanding chord substitution.
We also cover the III-VI-II-V-I chord progression and apply chord substitution to it. Here are the locations of the root notes for each of the intervals in a 3 6 2 5 1 progression. Technically the six should be minor, but we have turned it in to a V7 chord to get more of a jazz turnaround sound.
We also learn the dominant 7/9 chord voicing in this video, which can be used as a substitute for just about any V7 chord with a root on the big E string:
