LJS 92: How to Use Tritone Substitution In Your Jazz Improv

Welcome to episode 92 of the LJS Podcast where today we are talking about tritone substitution and how we can use it in our jazz improvisation. Tritone substitution is a cool harmonic tool jazz musicians use to add movement and color. This episode goes over several ways we can use it along with some lick examples. Listen in!
Listen to episode 92







In today's episode I explore tritone substitution and teach you how we can use this technique in our jazz improvisation. Jazz musicians are constantly adding and substituting chords and chord combinations while improvising and comping, and tritone subs are one great technique to use.
What's a tritone substitution? 
A tritone substitution occurs whenever a chord is being substituted or replaced by another chord with a root a tritone interval away. Example: G7 is replaced by Db7.
In this episode I give example of three different way to apply tritone substitution and I give some lick examples of how you could improvise over them. Here's a quick overview of what I talk about:

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What a tritone interval is and what it sounds like.

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What a tritone substitution is.

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Why tritone substitution works when comparing chord tones.

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Three ways to use tritone substitution.


As promised in the episode, here are the different tritone subs I cover along with the accompanying licks.
Tritone Sub of V


Tritone Sub of VI


Tritone Sub of ii









Read the Transcript
All right. Hey, what's up everybody? My name is Brent. I am the jazz musician behind the website LearnJazzStandards.com, which is a blog and a podcast, all geared towards helping you become a better jazz musician. Welcome, as I always say, whether you've been listening for a long time now or if this is the first time ever listening. Thanks for being here hanging out with me. I've got my coffee here ready to go. I'm ready to dive in to another episode here. This is episode 92 of the LJS Podcast, which today we are going to be talking about an important harmonic concept, harmonic tool in jazz music called the tritone substitution. Tritone substitution. This is a really cool concept, and so the goal for today's episode ... this is going to be a lesson, a teaching episode ... the goal for today is to not only define what is tritone substitution in case you don't know what that is already, but to dive into how we can use this tool to create more harmonic movement in our solos and to create different colors in our jazz improvisation.
Really excited to dive into that today. You can find today's show notes over at LearnJazzStandards.com/episode92, and that might be helpful for you, because I'm going to be giving some lick examples over top of these things. So if you want ... I always encourage people to learn things by ear, so if you're in the gym right now, you're running, or you're in the car and you want to go sit down with this later, you can either just go listen to this and slow it down and listen to the licks that I'm showing you, or you can go to the show notes and take a look at that notation there. Keep in mind everything is going to be in concert C today, so you'll have to transpose if you're a saxophone player, trumpet player, whatever instrument you are that is other than a C instrument, which is piano and guitar and instruments like that.
Okay, enough banter, let's jump into today's episode. This is all about tritone substitution. Just quickly before we start, you can find a lot of this material that we are talking about today also in our e-book called "Zero to Improv", so if you haven't checked that out yet, go check that out. It's an e-book that helps you become a better jazz improviser from t...