I Learned From That

TRITONE SUBSTITUTION, DEMYSTIFIED

BY NICK GUPPY

TRITONES, LIKE A LOT OF DEEPER MUSIC THEORY, passed me by when I was learning guitar. I was brought up in the pre-internet era on a mixture of Hank Marvin and The Beatles, alongside big-band swing 78rpm recordings from the likes of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, which gave me an ear for those stranger harmonies that I never lost, even though for years I never fully understood what was going on. Just the other week, I randomly happened across a piano tuition website and, within the space of a few minutes, found a simple and refreshingly different explanation of tritone substitution that helped a lot of things click into place. A tritone is an interval of three whole tones, which is six frets on a guitar. Simply put,…

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Guitarist (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 2019

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