chord-substitution

chord-substitution is a skill for Claude Code from GuitarAlchemist/ga. It costs 63 tokens per session (1,380 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A music-theory tool that suggests nearby chord alternatives or identifies the relationship between two chords.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find substitutions, reharmonize a chord, or check relationships such as tritone substitutions and secondary dominants.
Why use it?
It helps analyse or change harmony without relying on uncertain manual theory calculations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it to find substitutions, reharmonize a chord, or check relationships such as tritone substitutions and secondary dominants.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/guitaralchemist/ga/chord-substitution
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add GuitarAlchemist/ga --skill chord-substitution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/GuitarAlchemist/ga

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for chord-substitution

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/guitaralchemist/ga/chord-substitution/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/guitaralchemist/ga/chord-substitution)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/guitaralchemist/ga/chord-substitution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/guitaralchemist/ga/chord-substitution/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for chord-substitution

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/guitaralchemist/ga/chord-substitution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/guitaralchemist/ga/chord-substitution.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,380 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00063 $0.01380
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00690
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00276
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00138

Measured 9d ago against content hash b667f1fadb76, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

chord-substitution scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/chord-substitution/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Chord Substitution Analysis

When a user asks for harmonic substitutions or wants to compare two chords, call the appropriate MCP tool. Do NOT recall the theory rules from training knowledge — the relationships hinge on pitch-class arithmetic and Grothendieck ICV distance, both of which an LLM is unreliable at.

Two operations

1. ga_chord_substitutions(chordSymbol) — single source

Use when the user names ONE chord and asks for alternatives:

  • "What are some substitutions for Cmaj7?"
  • "Reharmonize G7 for me."
  • "Alternatives to F#m?"

Returns up to 5 nearby chords ranked by Grothendieck ICV cost (lower = closer). Each entry has Name, Cost, and L1Delta.

2. ga_chord_compare(chordA, chordB) — relationship between two

Use when the user names TWO chords and asks how they relate:

  • "Is G7 a tritone sub for Db7?"
  • "How are Am and C related?"
  • "Can I use Eb7 instead of A7?"

Returns a list of named relationships and the ICV L1 distance. Possible relationship types:

Type When it fires
Tritone Substitution Both chords are dominant 7ths and roots are 6 semitones apart
Secondary Dominant A is a perfect 5th above B (A functions as V of B)
Backdoor Dominant A is bVII7 of B (resolves up a whole step)
Set-Class Equivalent Same prime form under T/I equivalence
ICV Neighbor (L1 = N) Grothendieck L1 distance ≤ 2
Harmonic Distance Catch-all when no specific relationship triggered

Multiple relationships can co-fire on the same pair (a tritone sub is also typically an ICV neighbor).

Picking which tool to call

Count the chord symbols in the user message:

  • 1 chord → call ga_chord_substitutions(chordSymbol).
  • 2 chords → call ga_chord_compare(chordA, chordB). Argument order matters for secondary-dominant and backdoor-dominant classifications. Pass the first-named chord as chordA and the second as chordB — the tool's classifications are directional.

Supported chord symbols

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 123 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A b667f1fadb76

Subscribe to this mod's changes

chord-substitution is a skill published in the GitHub repository GuitarAlchemist/ga (2 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 1,380 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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