Today I learned about “Secondary Dominant”

I love music theory as it kind of gives you a way to categorize things you hear and for me it makes it easy to call upon a specific sound I want to produce. While playing harp in most cases is chord-less in the sense of harmonic chords the notion of chord progressions still can be expressed while arpeggiating. Most great soloists use arpaggiation to emphasize the current chord or in cases to create tension before resolving to a different chord.

One of the most basic tension resolution progressions is going from the dominant chord (the five chord) to one chord which is kind of the ultimate resolution. In the major scale this occurs naturally as a the five chord is a major chord. In the minor scale this concept is very popular as well although the 5 chord is a minor chord which does not do a great job of directing to the one chord and that is why we revert to the harmonic minor scale which actually is all about having the five chord in a minor scale act as a functioning dominant chord (which means a five dominant chord that leads to a one chord).

So to summarize if you have a C major scale the G7 is the dominant chord and if in a chord progression it leads to the C chord, which is the root it is a functioning dominant chord. In A minor which is the relative minor of C the five chord, is the E minor chord, which as said does not sound as good as a dominant chord in terms of tension / resolutions. So instead of playing a normal E minor chord we play a E7 which screams to be resolved to A minor.

Up until here I already was aware of, and have internalized it in my playing (guitar and harp). What I didn’t know about is the idea of “Secondary Dominant” which means that you can lead to any diatonic chord (chord with in the scale) by playing it’s dominant chord briefly which creates tension that resolves to the diatonic chord. So if we are in C major scale and we are playing a C major chord going to a D minor chord progression, we can sneak in a A7 chord which is not in the C major scale, which will lead to the D minor chord.

So applying this technique to your harp playing it means that you can use the A7 arpeggio which is the 3 bent hole step, 4 bent a half step, 5 blow and 6 blow which creates a tension which can be resolved to 4 draw, 5 draw, 6 draw.

Here is a video talking about the concept:

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