One of the most important concepts in reharmonization is the use of secondary chords. Secondary chords are chords with tension (such as dominant seventh chords) that can bring us to other chords. They’re pretty straightforward, easy to use, and will quickly spice up your arrangement.
Recently, the first group of students went through my 10 Steps to Reharm Video Course (join the waitlist for the next one here). As part of the course, I did a series of livestreams where I would answer questions and apply the concepts from the course to a number of songs in real time. In the video below, you find an excerpt from that livestream where I use secondary chords to reharmonize “In My Life” by the Beatles. In this blog post, I wanted to clearly lay out the three basic types of secondary chords, and show you how I applied them.
Step 1: secondary dominant chords
The first type of secondary chord is a secondary dominant. Go a perfect fifth up from your target chord, then build a dominant seventh chord on that note. This chord will “want” to resolve to that “target chord”. For example, in “In My Life”, we can add in a C#7 chord that resolves to a F#m chord (our “target chord”):
Step 2: ii - V progressions
The second type is ii-V progressions. You’re probably familiar with them. It’s a similar process to adding secondary dominants, but now you add a minor 7th chord a whole step above your target chord, followed by the secondary dominant from step 1. So before the first chord (A major) we can add a Bm7 – E7. Before F#m we can add a G#m7(b5) and C#7. The reason for the half-diminished chord (minor 7th with a flat 5th) is that our target chord is minor, which means the ii-chord will have that flat 5th.
Step 3: tritone substitute chords
The third type of secondary chord is a tritone substitute chord. We can create this by taking our secondary dominant, then creating a root that’s a tritone interval away from that secondary dominant, and then creating a dominant 7th chord on that. So instead of an E7 chord resolving to A major (remember, E7 is the V of A), we can take the tritone of E, which is a Bb, and then create a Bb7 chord. For the D major chord, we can create a dominant (A7), take the tritone away from that (Eb), and create a dominant seventh chord, Eb7. For more details on tritone substitute chords, I wrote a blog post on them: How to use Tritone Substitute Chords
These tritone substitute chords really stand out and add a lot of unexpected color to your arrangement. You would not easily expect an Eb7 chord in the key of A, and it can be a nice surprise.
Conclusion
And those are the basic secondary chords. With just these three, you get very far in your reharmonizations. Because they’re theoretically sound, they will make your arrangement flow, and can really add some nice colors and spiciness.
I’m also discussing these concepts in my free Reharmonization Quick Guide, which you can download here.
For the full walkthrough of these secondary chords, watch the video below:
