Chords

Chords, quality by quality

A chord symbol is a root plus a quality, and the quality is where the learning is. These are reference pages rather than articles: each takes one quality and holds every drop-2 shape of it — playable, across three string sets, re-fingered for whichever root you pick.

• The maj7 chord, in every key The chord jazz comes home to — twelve fingerings, the top-note logic, and why three of the cards are named 6.
• The m7 chord, in every key The workhorse — the ii of nearly everything, the one-finger barre, and the relative major's 6 chord hiding in its grips.
• The dominant 7 chord, in every key The chord that pushes — the tritone between its guide tones, the V of every cadence, and the blues where it plays all four parts.
• The m7♭5 chord, in every key The half-diminished — the tritone between its root and fifth, the minor sixth chord in its mirror, and the front door of every minor cadence.
• The dim7 chord, in every key The symmetric chord — four notes a minor third apart, one shape repeating every three frets, and only three distinct diminished sevenths in all.

The sixth quality, the mMaj7, has no page of its own. It is the one that turns up in none of the forms the progression pages play: it belongs to a falling line rather than a slot in a progression — a minor chord whose seventh sits a half step under the root, on its way down to the m7 and then the m6. You can hear it in the comparison below, and the voicing explorer plays all twelve of its shapes in any root.

Hear the six qualities

Before the pages, the sound. This is all six qualities on one root, voiced as close together as the fretboard allows: each is the drop-2 shape in root position, register-matched the way the app's ear trainer matches its answer choices, so switching between two qualities changes only the notes that set them apart. From the maj7 to the dominant 7, the seventh falls a half step. From the dominant to the m7, the third. From the m7 to the m7♭5, the fifth — and from the m7♭5 to the dim7, the seventh again. That walk flattens one note per step; the mMaj7 sits just off it, an m7 with its major seventh back.

Select a quality to see and hear it, select it again to replay; the two buttons on the card play the shape alone or over its root. The note on top is always the 3rd — start there, bright or dark, before the subtler sevenths. And once in a while a lowered note would fall below an open string: the shape then slides to a neighboring string set to keep the sound, the same trade the app's ear trainer makes. There, this runs as a game — a shape sounds unnamed, and these six rows are the answers.

How to use them

Treat each page as the long way around one chord. Play the twelve cards until the repeats surprise you — the same four pitches keep turning up on different string sets — then pick a different root and watch the whole page move. When the shapes stop feeling new, follow the links at the bottom of the page into the progression pages, where the same grips do their job inside a form with the band underneath.

If you want the reasoning first, the articles cover it: what a drop-2 voicing is, why two notes — the guide tones — decide a chord's quality, and how voice leading chooses between the inversions these pages lay out. For a word rather than an explanation, the glossary answers in a sentence or two.

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