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.

Four more qualities — the dominant 7, m7♭5, dim7 and mMaj7 — get their pages next; until then, the voicing explorer already plays all six, twelve roots each, just without the story.

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.

Next: Browse the articles →