JasonShadrick

Many novice guitarists stick to the garden variety bar chords when they first start playing jazz. These give the texture a more muddy feeling and don’t sound too much like the voicings heard on many jazz albums.

The first thing I teach guitarists is how to create and use Drop 2 chord shapes. These are very easy to understand and almost instantly make your comping more authentic.

Creating a Drop 2 Voicing
In order to create a Drop 2 voicing you must first learn the basics of 7th chord construction. In order to have a 7th chord you must have four notes represented:

Root 3rd 5th 7th
C E G B

This is a C Major 7th chord in the key of C. Here is what it looks like on the staff:

This voicing is in root position, meaning that the lowest note of the chord is the root. In order to make this more playable on the guitar, we will raise it up an octave.

Next, we will take the 2nd note from the top (G) and lower it an octave:

This leaves us with a Drop 2 voicing for C Major Seventh:

By extending this idea through all four inversions on the top four strings, it creates the following voicings.

The next step would be to lower the 7th of each chord to Bb in order to make dominant 7th voicings.

Of course the next step would be lowering all of the 3rds to Eb to make minor 7th chords.

The final step would be to lower all of the 5ths to Gb to create Minor 7th Flat 5 chords.

I have written up a PDF lesson of these concepts on my Guitar Resources page.