Play Your First Five Jazz Guitar Chords
Chord shapes to get into the world of Jazz Guitar
Unlike most musicians guitarists and pianists have to spend much of their practise time on learning and recalling chords as well as solo or single note lines. For me, there are four levels of chords on guitar. They are open chords, barre chords, seventh block chords and finally whatever magical voicings you create for yourself along with other beautiful and unique voicings that great musicians have created or discovered.
Today, I’m going to focus on that third category, namely, the seventh chords. After a player has learned open chords and suffered through the pain that are barre chords, you can reach the thankfully more comfortable and rich world of seventh chords, which are a stable of the Jazz chord vocabulary.
I mentioned in the title five chords. So let’s breakdown what they will be. Firstly, we have a Major7th Chord, a dreamy quality, great for ballads, next a Dominant7th chord, main stay of blues and very often a chord with tension that leads to somewhere more relaxed. Thirdly, we have a Minor7th chord, a chill chord and appears in many a vamp and also part of many Jazz progressions, usually before the Dominant7th. The fourth chord is a Minor7b5 chord, also popular in a ballad and in certain contexts may just be the cheesiest chord every (in a good way). And finally, the Diminished7th, the most harsh sounding chord, used to convey tension when needed, or again depending on the context, a passing dissonance that the listener barely notices but very much enjoys.
For each of these chords, the first one is called a drop 3 voicing and the second one is called a drop 2. I’ll write another newsletter on the difference between the two but just know that these are the two most commonly played shapes on the guitar for each of these chords.
The dreamy one
The funky or unstable one
The chill one
The potentially cheesy one/ Wagner’s Tristan chord
The scary one
Finally, here is a chord progression that uses all of these chord qualities, it goes as follows:
Cmaj7 - C#dim7 - Dm7 - D#dim7 - Em7 - Fmaj7 - F#dim7 - C/G - A7 - Dm7 - Dm7b5 - G7(13) - Bdim7 - Cmaj7.
Little journey around all those qualities in a very cliché fashion, but a classic.
Remember that this is only the beginning, these chords show only C as the root/name of the chord, there are many more to learn. These chords are also only in root position (the name of the chord is also the lowest note), each of these chords cannot only be played in different positions across the neck but in different inversions where the other notes are in the bass (become the lowest note). Happy Strumming!
Warm Regards