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Suspended chords are a common alteration made to open chords to provide a bit of texture or movement without changing what chord we're centered around.
After Dominant 7th chords, these are some of the most common chord alterations we will find in popular music.
Let's check out the most common forms of this new chord!
Here we have the Major and Minor versions of the D chord, along with it's sus2 and sus4 variants.
Notice how the only string that's changing here is the high E string.
While we typically won't play D and Dm in the same chord progression, you can absolutely use both Suspended variants with either D or Dm.
Try it out by playing: D - Dsus2 - Dsus4 - D
And: Dm - Dsus2 - Dsus4 - Dm
Here we have the Major and Minor versions of the A chord, along with it's sus2 and sus4 variants.
This time, it's the B string that's changing.
Again, try out using these Suspended chord in both a major and a minor context by playing:
A - Asus2 - Asus4 - A
And:
Am - Asus2 - Asus4 - Am
If you played through the suggested chord progressions above, you can probably see how versatile these suspended chords can be. They hold a certain amount of tension that can be released by returning back to the standard chord.
This lets you provide movement to a chord progression without introducing any new chords! They're great for adding some color to your rhythm playing in an improvisation context, whereas a new chord entirely is likely to throw everybody off.
The chords above are perhaps the most common suspended chords used on guitar due to their simplicity, but you can turn any major or minor chord into a suspended chord.
To truly understand how these chords work, and how to build them ourselves, we need to start looking into chord theory.
CLICK HERE if you're ready to get started learning about triads!
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