The voicing
What is a drop-2 voicing?
Take a four-note chord in close position and let the second voice from the top fall an octave. That single move — the drop — gave this app its name, and gave jazz guitar the voicings it comps with.
Start in close position
A Cmaj7 chord in close position stacks its four notes as tightly as they can go — C, E, G, B, each a third from the next. Under a pianist's hand that is one comfortable grip. On the fretboard it is a stretch at best: four notes packed inside one octave force thirds onto adjacent strings, and some close shapes cannot be fingered at all.
Drop the second voice
Count voices from the top: B is the first, G the second. Take that G down an octave and the chord becomes G–C–E–B — the same four notes, opened up. The crowding is gone, each note lands on its own string, and the grip settles under the hand. That is the drop-2 voicing of Cmaj7.
Four inversions, one family
Run the same move on each close-position inversion of Cmaj7 and you get four drop-2 shapes that ladder up the neck, each named by its lowest note. You get a different set of shapes depending on whether you play them on the Top 4, Mid 4, or Bottom 4 strings. The speaker on each card plays the shape, strummed just as the app plays it; the speaker with the dropped dot adds the bass on the root.
Root on top would clash with the maj7 — so this shape swaps the 7 for a 6, and Cmaj7 becomes C6.
The voicings you hear are the app’s own sampled guitar — from the MuseScore General sound library, used under the MIT license.
The same logic repeats on the middle four strings (A–D–G–B) and the lower four (E–A–D–G). Three string sets, four inversions each: learn the twelve shapes for one chord quality and every root is a slide away — the maj7 chord page lays out all twelve for this chord, playable, in whichever root you pick. And the drop doesn't stop at the second voice — let the third voice fall instead and you get the wider drop-3 voicing, built for playing without a bassist. Go the other way — strip a shape back to its root, third and seventh — and you have a shell voicing, the three-note frame a drop-2 is built on. Swap a drop-2's root or fifth for a color tone and the same four fingers spell a ninth, eleventh, or thirteenth.
Why it sounds like jazz
A drop-2 voicing leaves room. The top voice sits clear of the inner ones, so it can carry a melody. The spread leaves space for a bass player underneath. And neighboring chords connect with small moves — voice leading, an inner voice sliding a half-step while the shape barely changes. It is the sound of Wes Montgomery's chord choruses, and of most jazz-guitar comping on record since: full, but never crowded. If you arrived here from barre chords, that spread is the thing they cannot give you — why CAGED, on its own, is not enough for jazz. If you would rather just make the plain chords you already play sound more like a jazz record, that is a short handful of moves. And to hear these shapes doing that job in a real progression, with a band and in any key, the progression pages string them together.
Where Drop2 comes in
The Drop2 app is named after the voicing, and teaches it the way everything else in the app works — by listening. Browse every inversion of maj7, 7, m7, m7♭5, dim7, and mMaj7 across all three string sets and hear them played back (Learn), play the named voicing and have it checked by ear (Train), then comp the shapes in time over a walking-bass-and-drums band (Play-Along, part of Premium). Seventy-two shapes, one octave drop at a time.
Free to start, no time limit · Works with acoustic and electric guitar
Next: What is a drop-3 voicing? →