Guitar Chord Voicings and Inversions - How to Use them


Published on 26 January 2016
If you would like to gain full access to all our Guitar Teaching Materials please visit the Secret Guitar Teacher Site and take a free tour: http://www.secretguitarteacher.com/youtube/ssb.php?lp_id=417 Here's the video transcript: In the last Sound Bite we briefly went over a bit of theory behind the formation of different chord shapes on the guitar. And we defined the term chord voicing as a 'rearrangement' of the notes of a chord using different strings or fret positions. And we defined the term Inversion is a special case of a chord voicing where the rearrangement results in a note other than the root note of the chord being heard as the lowest sound in the chord. In practical terms, the difference between using Root position chords and using inversions matters little when you are simply embellishing your chord playing. Today I want to get you on the road to putting this information to practical use, by looking at some voicings just using the top three strings of the guitar. Last lesson we took the C Major chord and figured out that it contained the notes C E and G - then we looked at all the possible places on the fret board that these three notes appear. You can see that if we divide these up into feasible chord shapes on the top three strings, it gives us three clear shapes. I've circled four shapes here, but notice that the last one is simply a repeat of the first one an octave higher. Remember all fret board patterns repeat every 12 frets. To make sure we can apply these ideas equally well to any chord, it is important to get away from thinking of specific notes and instead, get used to thinking in intervals So I have replaced the note names C E and G with interval designations: R for Root Note, 3 for third and 5 for 5th. Notice I have also done away with the fret numbers so that this now represents a pattern that can be moved around the fret board to work with any major chord. Don't worry if, for the moment, this makes little sense - all should become clearer as we move forward! So, for the chord of C I can use these three shapes here for example, as a way of embellishing the basic open C Chord. If I then want to do a similar thing for the F chord I have to use the red coloured root notes as my guide. So for this shape , the root is on the second string so I find the note F on the second string B C C# D D# E F here at the sixth fret . For the next shape up the root is on the third string. I know I'll find an F four frets higher up than the one we found here on the second string so I can use this shape there for a voicing of the F chord....And I can find the third shape rooted on the top E string. So here's F right up here at fret 13 and I can play this shape there as a high voicing of the F chord. These ideas need grooving in with lots of repetition like this: C ...open position...rooted at fifth fret ...rooted at 10th fret ...rooted at 13th fret then play the basic F chord followed by F rooted at fret 6 ...fret 10 ...and fret 13 . Then I'd also work this backwards ....and randomly until I felt quite at home with it all. And finally you can begin to work this into your playing, and use these voicings to embellish both the C and the F maybe something like this .