The Tritone, Substitution, Cycle 4
(22 Jan 04)
Ok so what does it all mean?
You can use this information to select chord voicings for altered Dominant chords that can be moved in minor thirds and not change their function.
You can use these ideas in your solos to create tension during cycles of altered dominant chords. You can even use these ideas to create tension when playing over un-altered Dominant cycles.
Since the arpeggios from these movable forms will have the same interval structure when displaced by some number of minor thirds you can create interest in your solo by repeating patterns based on thes arpeggios.
In general this should help your understanding of the reasons why tritone substitution works and why movement in descending half steps, ascending whole steps and descending major thirds creates cycle four movement.
There are numerous voicings for Altered Dominant chords that can be displaced through any number of minor third interval sand still retain their function. I have only shown one example. If you truly appreciate this and want to know more you can reveal the other possibilities for voicings that work this way.
If you read the "'Giant Steps' and Cycle Diagrams" by Dan Adler (the link can be found in this thread: Cycles in General and Coltrane Changes)
He talks about the cycle based on major thirds.
Coltrane used these 4 cycles as the basis for the root motion of 'Giant Steps' – which brings us back to why we started looking at these cycles in the first place. In fact, the top right triangle is the entire formula of the tonal centers of ‘Giant Steps’ in the original key.
We can expand this slightly by merging in one piece of extra information from the cycle of the fifths: precede each root by its V7. This leads to two possibilities of traversing the triangle: walk to the left or walk to the right.
Right: B - Bb7 | Eb - D7 | G - F#7 | B ||
Left : B - D7 | G - Bb7 | Eb - F#7 | B || (Giant Steps)
My guess is that Coltrane chose the 2nd option because adding the V7 before the roots in the first instance created a 1/2 step downward bass motion, which makes the progression sound more predictable, since root motion from I to VII7 is a common vehicle for going to the diatonic III and this progression would then sound like a standard major/minor deceptive cadence (going to IIImaj7 instead of IIIm7).
I believe tht real reason Coltrane chose the counter-clockwise version of this is the observation I stated earlier about how moving down a major 3rd is equivalent to moving up a perfect fourth (for chords with m3 symmetry).
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