Description: This one goes way beyond the ordinary and into the realm of the SUPER-CHORD! We explore altered chords and their use as substitute chords.

REVIEW
Any time you look at something that's considered "Advanced" it's a good idea to define what is not advanced. So here's a little review. Remember that the 3 types of chords in any key are as follows:

Major
Minor
Diminished

Now that's pretty basic stuff and if you're a little lost already, you should go and look at the section called "Fundamentals of Music Theory", "In the Key of...", and "Building Extended Chords", to get a more detailed review. That being said, let's forge ahead.

The chord that we'll be dealing with in this lesson is the Dominant 7th chord. It's the chord in any key that naturally occurs (as an extended chord in any key) as the 5th of the key. In other words, the 5th in the key of C is G. So the G7 is the Dominant 7th chord in the key of C.

ALTERED DOMINANT CHORDS
When you say, "Altered dominant chord," it sounds pretty complicated but really it isn't. All you have to learn is where the 5th and 9th of a dominant 7th chord is on the guitar. This is because the definition (for our purposes here) of an altered chord is one in which the 5th and/or the 9th has been raised or lowered by a 1/2 step (or 1 fret.)