It sounds wide and glassy, bright rather than tense. The ♯11 clears the major third by a whole step, so it adds height without the collision a natural eleventh makes.
6 moveable shapes. None has an open string in it, so each one plays every root there is; the dots are degrees, and R is the root.
Pick a root and every diagram below moves to it. Nothing about any of the grips changes — only the fret they start on, and each one starts somewhere different because they are rooted on different strings.
Showing C9♯11. Every voicing of it, open strings included, is on its own chord page.
The lowest root available, so these are the fullest-sounding shapes and the ones that carry a band. F at the first fret, G at the third, A at the fifth: the shape is the same and the fret is the whole of the difference.
898988
6 notes · 2 frets
878778
6 notes · 2 frets
8x897x
4 notes · 3 frets
The other half of the pair. Almost every progression is played by alternating these with the low E shapes, because a root a fourth up the neck is a root two frets along the string below — the hand barely moves.
x3435x
4 notes · 3 frets
x32332
5 notes · 2 frets
No bass note under it, which is the point rather than a shortcoming: these sit above a bass player instead of competing with one, and they reach the extensions the lower shapes have no fingers left for.
x-x-10-11-11-12
4 notes · 3 frets
Every voicing of one particular 9♯11 chord — including the open-string ones that do not move — is on that chord's own page, linked under each shape above. All the moveable shapes for every quality are on the shapes index, and the altered dominant chords as a family are on their own page.
Shows each chord the way this style would voice it, and marks which of its alternatives belong to the idiom.