Have you ever run into chord symbols like this: C7sus or Dsus? Those are chord suspensions.

Good morning, this is Duane and today I like to talk about suspensions. There are several kinds of chord suspensions, but the one we’re going to talk about today and what musicians generally refer to as suspension is where the fourth chord takes the place of the third. For example, here’s the F chord, so if I had a suspension this is the third, I use the fourth instead, so that’s an F suspension. Now, suspensions are usually combined with seventh chord, so usually have an F seventh, a sus would be like that. If you saw that notation, F sus that would be what it means. Don’t play the third, but play the fourth in place of the third and then the seventh and play the fifth too, of course.

Quite often you can harmonize that fourth by putting the second under it. Then you have a kind of a complex, like that kind of complex chord. Suspensions are wonderful animal because you can use them not only by themselves but also to resolve to the seventh chord. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re playing misty. That’s a major seventh. That’s a suspension right there, you see the chord is C seventh, but I’m using a F instead of the E here and I’m harmonizing with a D. Now I resolve it there. That’s the suspension, resolutions, you see I had the fourth, but I moved to the third, once more. That was sloppy. You see that, okay, so it’s simply where the fourth takes the place of the third.

Sometimes, you can use it right at the beginning of a song, like, here’s a song called Here’s That Rainy Day and it starts like this, there’s the suspension right there. I’m playing a C seventh, but I’m using a fourth instead of the third. In essence, it’s a G minor seventh and then you resolve it is C seventh before you go on. Let’s take What a Friend We Have in Jesus, if we’re in the key of F, how would we make suspension there. That’s right, replace the third with the fourth, harmonize it with the second and you could add a seventh, so we can start What a Friend We Have in Jesus like this.

That’s the suspension resolution, see. That’s the C seventh chord, but I’m playing the fourth instead of the third and harmonizing it with the second there or the ninth. Then, I resolve it. That’s another suspension or we could end with it. That’s the suspension because the fourth is taking the place of the third and then I resolve it. It’s kind of like in amen [inaudible 00:04:13], but it’s not a full [inaudible 00:04:17]. It just is a suspension resolving to the third. That’s really all you need to know about suspensions. You just need to find places to use them. Anytime you have a dominant seventh chord, then you can probably use the suspension. It depends on the melody of course, but most of the time you can do it.

Let’s play through some chords and figure out with the suspensions are. For a C chord that would be a suspension. For a C seventh chord that would C seventh suspension and remember you can harmonize it if you want. How about F, for F a suspension is taking, fourth takes the place of the third, harmonize it, add the seventh if you want, like what we did in What a Friend We Have in Jesus. How about G, there’s G, fourth takes the place of the third, harmonize it, add the seventh. How about D flat, say, we replace the third with the fourth and we can harmonize it with that and add the seventh if we want to.

How about E flat, E flat suspension seventh, see that is no hard, is it? A flat, suspension, harmonize seventh. You can work your way through the 12 chords like that. I won’t bore you by working those through but it’s a very useful tool because it adds an extra chord to your sequence. In other words, instead of going right to the dominant seventh chord, you go to the suspension first and then resolve it.

That’s it for today, so I hope you enjoyed this little mini lesson, piano tips. If you like this sort of thing, come on over to PlayPiano.com and sign-up for our free newsletter of piano tips and you get something like this most every day, so thanks and we’ll see you then. Bye bye for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UzX7NuhD1M&feature=youtu.be
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