Most guitar played spend something like 80 percent of their time playing chords, yet few of them take enough time to work on their chord vocabulary. Instead, they rely on old standby shapes and voicings to get through tunes.
Sure, that root-position 9th chord may sound really cool and be easy to execute, but a little variety could take your rhythm work a whole lot further. After all, constantly searching the neck for root-position chord voicings is neither the most efficient nor the most exciting rhythm technique available.
If these habits sound familiar to you, this lesson may be just what you need. As a useful guide to chord voicings, it can expand your vocabulary, make you sound more professional and allow you to play the voicings you hear in your head. (How you handle the voices in your head is another matter entirely.)
TRIADS
Depending on what type of music you play, you may think that you use all the triad shapes available. However, you may be surprised to find a few that you haven’t plied recently. The most common shapes, of course, are open-position cowboy chords and the barre chords that are based on them. These make for fantastic triad voicings, but to limit yourself to those shape is to do your music an injustice.
Let’s start by taking a look at the most popular barre-chord shapes. By far, guitarists use the E and A shapes more than any other barre chord. There are three other shapes, however, that are useful: C, G and D, as shown in FIGURE 1. (Root notes are indicated by the white dot in all these examples.)
The first two shapes, C and G, are identical in harmonic structure (low to high. 1-3-5-1-3).