The Ultimate Guide to Jazz Guitar Voicings

When it comes to chord voicings, the guitar neck is full of almost limitless possibilities … and it may be overwhelming for developing players and more seasoned players alike. Today, we’re going to look at some essential voicings for jazz guitar, and talk about how to create voicings with guide tones and tensions, using voice leading through a standard, more melodic approaches to comping, and then we’ll add that over a tune.

If you’re interested in seeing how Cecil plays through any of the material we talk about, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, “The Ultimate Guide to Jazz Guitar Voicings,” and if you’d like to try even more, check out Cecil’s course with Jazz Lesson Videos, Voicing Techniques for Jazz Guitar.

Contents

Guide tones and voicings

“No Greater Love” voicings

Advanced comping techniques

Guide tones and voicings

Guide tones are the third and the seventh of a chord voicing. And these are really the most important parts of a chord. So if we take Cmaj7 voicing, and if we take out the fifth, we’re just going to end up with the root, seventh, and third, which are going to be the most important notes.

And really, you could even leave out the root if you wanted to—if the bass player is playing C, you'll know that this is a Cmaj7 voicing.

If we move that B down to B flat, you'll know that this is a C7 sound.

Then if we move E down to E-flat, you'll know that this is a C minor voicing.

So guide tones are going to be the most important part of the chord, but they also free you up to add a little bit more information to the voicing if you want to. You can replace the fifth with different voicings, like the 6 or the 13.

If we have C, A, B, and E, we have root, tension, and then the two guide tones on top. We could also add tensions above the guide tones if we wanted to.

So we end up with the six an octave higher, which has a pretty different color to it than this one. That's just because of the arrangement of the notes. We have this major second here, and then a fourth. And here we have all fourths.

You could add other tensions to the chord if you wanted to, like thinking of more like a Lydian sound, so keeping those guide tones where they are, and then adding the #11 on top or even down the octave.

And we could also think of the guide tones in different arrangements as well.

So we have them as a fourth, but also as a fifth like this, so E and B, and that frees us up to different voicings and adding different tensions as well. So we could add the ninth like this, and that's going to be a really common voicing for a Cmaj9.

And a Cmaj9, you could also think of doing inversions of that, even though you may not normally do inversions of tensions, can end up with pretty voicings.

If we take the guide tones of a dominant seventh chord again (so root kind of optional), we have the 3 and the b7.

We can add the 9 above that. We can also add the #11 above that, for like a C7 with a 9 and a #11. We can add the 13th above that as well. For Cm7, if we take the guide tones in the same arrangement as like a fifth—so from E-flat to B-flat, for Cm7, there's our minor nine voicing. You can also have a minor nine with an 11 as well, or even just the guide tones plus the 11th. 

The cool thing about guide tones is they not only free you up to grab different tensions around the fretboard, but they also get you closer to making up your own voicings on the fly, which is kind of what comping should generally be. It's just looking for different melodic shapes throughout the scale, and having that underpinning of the guide tones allows you to do things that are really logical and still support the harmony. 

“No Greater Love” voicings

Now let's talk about how we can apply some of these concepts, over the standard, “There is No Greater Love.”

Taking a quick look at the chord changes for this tune, we're going to be in the key of B-flat. We're going to start with B-flat major, going into the IV7, kind of similar to what we have in a blues, which is going to resolve down to the bVII7 which is Ab7. You could also think of this as being like the sub V/vi, because it moves down a half step to the vi chord. So it's kind of a substitute of like a D7 sound moving to G7. Once we get to that G7, we're then going to sit on C7—so that's going to be our V7/V, because it resolves down to the V7, and then we have our turnaround progression. 

So we have I-vi-ii-V, same thing for the second A section, then for our B section, we're going to change tonalities to the relative minor. Going from Bb to Gm, we're going to have Am7b5, D7b9 into G minor. That's going to be our minor, iiº-V. 

You can feel free to take any of the liberties harmonically that we talked about before, maybe incorporating a natural nine, derived from the Locrian natural two scale, or even dominant 13 with a b9. And then on the i or vi, depending on how you're thinking of it, maybe a m6 sound or mM7 sound there, incorporating the ninth as well. We repeat that progression twice, and then we move to C7 again, which again is our V7/V, where you can feel free to use that #11 sound that we talked about before, or even using those guide tones on the bottom and then grabbing the 9 and the 13 instead. 

Another cool thing you can do with dominant chords specifically is to have the guide tones separated by a tension. Here we have Bb and E, and then we put a D in the middle and the root on top, just for a bit of extra support, which gives us a really nice voicing. You have those thirds, second, and then a minor six on top. Then we move into our V7, where you can feel free to throw in a lot of different tensions, b13, b13 and b9, b13 and #9, or b9, 3, 5, and root on top. So the only guide tone you have in there is the 3, no b7. 

Then we move back into our tonic chord for our last A section where you can use any of the major voicings that we talked about—like drop twos. You may want to avoid the voicing with that seventh on the bottom and that minor ninth between those middle voices. Then our IV7, we have the root on the bottom. There's the guide tones, one tension, b7, 9, or even 13, since this is a non functioning dominant chord. We can throw in that #11 to like a #9 sound, which sounds really nice. 

Another thing you can think about with dominant chords is more rootless voicing options. So for G7, we might do kind of like a m7b5 sort of voicing on F, but against that G bass, that's going to give us the b7, 3, #5 and the b13, or even grabbing the root on top, or the b7 doubled on the top and the bottom. We really have a lot of different options, and it just depends on what sort of sound you want. Then we're going to have our C7 V7/V to V, and then back to the tonic.

Advanced comping techniques

Next up, we're going to take a look at some more advanced comping techniques, including the use of passing diminished chords and passing chromatic chords. 

For this next section, we’ll talk about some more melodic approaches to comping. It's adjacent to chord soloing techniques, something that you might hear players like Kenny Burrell or Wes Montgomery using in their comping. The basic idea is that we're paying attention to the lead line of all the different chord voicings. 

So this is ii7 in the key of C or Dm7. We have E on top E-flat, on top of Db7, and then D on top Cmaj7. But if we take this one step further and really try to create actual melodies on top of our comping ideas, we can take our comping to the next level. The basic idea is that if you have a consonant note or a chord tone that you're trying to harmonize on top of the chord, you're going to drop consonant stuff underneath that. That means guide tones taking advantage of drop twos, drop threes, things like that. For example, if I have Dm9, we have that E as the top note, which you would consider a constant note on a minor seven chord, because it's a tension nine. 

If we were to precede that with, say, a chromatic approach tone from below, we can do that one of two ways. Anything that's outside of the key you want to support with either diminished passing chords or chromatic passing chords. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to lead into that using Dbm9 and Dm9, but we could also do Cº7. We’re thinking of that lead tone as being the b3 of that Cº into Dm9. 

This creates an interesting voice leading—you'll see in Cº, we have C, Gb, A and Eb. C and A are going to stay where they are, and then Gb and Eb are going to move in contrary motion. So Gb moves down to F, and then Eb moves up to E. That sort of motion sounds really rich. So if we were to follow that sort of approach with a more extended chromatic approach or enclosure, say if we did something like this, where really the target, if we are thinking of this as Dm7, is going to be that F and everything before that is kind of auxiliary. 

We could do chromatic passing chords. We could do diminished passing chords to support those notes, but we have E, G, Gb, E into F, our target, if we’re thinking of Dm7. We know we’re probably going to do this voicing underneath that F on Dm7. This is just a drop two. We have D, A, C, and F on top. But leading into that, we’re going to do this approach. This is C#º to support the E on top, Eº to support G on top, Ebº to support Gb on top. And then finally, have a chromatic passing chord, Dbm and drop two root position to Dm drop two in root position. 

There are a lot of different ways that you could articulate that, depending on tempo. But this can prove to be a really useful concept for supporting the melodies that are on top of your chords. That's probably one of Cecil’s favorite things to do going into a minor chord.

We can do that on different string sets as well. So that was C#º just part of the diminished voicing. We have the root, the 6 (or the bb7) and the b3 up a minor third to Eº, E-flatº, Dbm to Dm and just guide tones there. So 1, b7, and b3 on top. 

But the idea is that you want to collect pieces of vocabulary with this sort of concept, so that you can grab them quickly—kind of the same thing that you would think about with single note soloing, where you want to have licks and cells that you can use over chord progressions. You also want to have the same thing with chord voicings, so then you can grab that stuff to support a soloist even further. We can think of creating chord soloing vocabulary and melodic comping vocabulary over ii-V-I progressions over static chords like major seven, minor seven, dominant seven, and minor seven flat five. And also think of doing things like writing solos over tunes, using chord soloing vocabulary, just so you can grab those things when the moment calls for it. 

And finally, we'll look at how all these techniques sound over the standard “All The Things You Are.

That’s all for today, but if you’re looking to see how Cecil plays through anything we talked about, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, “The Ultimate Guide to Jazz Guitar Voicings,” as well as Cecil’s course with Jazz Lesson Videos, Voicing Techniques for Jazz Guitar.