Tip: The Subdominant Chord
Back to the Big Picture of making music: the viewpoint that gives you an understanding of how music works. The last installment talked about key centers: the all-important concept that drives Western music. And we looked at the three principal characters in this drama: the tonic, the subdominant and the dominant.
Please see the last entry for more background info, including what the tonic chords are. If you’re already lost, keep this in mind. The point that there are not bazillions of chords you need to know to make music, there are only three — tonic, dominant and subdominant. Discovering this for yourself is like having each dollar in your wallet turn into a $50. Okay, enough rehash. We’re into the subdominant. What is its function? Heck, what is it? The subdominant type of chord is the chord that says, “Not so fast, my pretties. I know you want to reach the mellow and restful tonic chord. But you have to get through me first. I have the same basic sound as the tonic, but when you hear me, you know you’re not ‘home’ yet. You’ve only arrived at a pit stop.”
Yes, the subdominant is kind of a friendly nemesis to the tonic chord. When you hear it, you hear the music wanting to move somewhere else. Let’s see this in action. Get out your guitar, and play these chords in this order: C, Am, Dm, G7, F. Strum each chord twice. What did you feel when you finished playing? Kind of unresolved, right? Like there needed to be something else. That’s because we ended this micro ditty on a subdominant chord, not a tonic chord.
Let’s get more specific. Which degrees of the major scale have the subdominant chords? Just two: the ii and the IV. (Nothing special about these Roman numerals. Using them is just an indicator that we’re talking about parts of the major scale, and not, say, the beats within a measure of music.)
The ii and the IV, when translated into an actual key, (C major in this example), yields these chords: Dm and F. For a quick sanity check, look at the subdominant chords in the key of F major: Gm and Bb.
Next important point is one already covered in the last tip: you can (often) swap one subdominant chord for another. So the next time you’re playing a tune in C major, and the tune calls for an F major chord, try playing a Dm (or Dm7) instead.
A bit of detail here: If it’s true we can swap these chords, they ought to sound fairly similar, correct? Let’s look at the notes in each: Dm: D F A. F major: F A C. Good: two notes in common out of three. Now, dig this: Dm7: D F A C, and F6: F A C D. Same notes. In one sense, they are the same chord. So you know they are interchangeable.
Next time we’ll look at the dominant.
Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow
This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News – July 15, 2005 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.