It sounds lush, and only just resolved. The everyday tonic of jazz, bossa and neo-soul.
10 moveable shapes, 3 of them drop 2. 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 Cmaj7. 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.
8-10-9-9-8-8
6 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.
x35453
5 notes · 3 frets
x3241x
4 notes · 4 frets
x-15-14-12-12-x
4 notes · 4 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-10-12-12-12
4 notes · 3 frets
x-x-10-9-8-7
4 notes · 4 frets
Nothing at all underneath the root here. There is no bass to compete with anybody, which is the whole use of these: they comp over a bass player, or sit under a melody, and they are what is left of a chord once everything not telling you what it is has been taken away.
xxx557
3 notes · 3 frets
The same chord with something other than the root underneath. You reach for one of these because of what the bass is doing, not because of what the chord is — a bass line that walks while the harmony stays put is made of these.
5 in the bass.
5 on the D string, root on the G string
xx5557
4 notes · 3 frets
Close position — R–3–5–7 and its rotations — puts four notes inside an octave, which will not fit under a hand on adjacent strings. Drop the second voice from the top down an octave and it does. That is the whole operation, and it is why these exist: four notes, four adjacent strings, no gap to reach over, and the grip slides.
The base voicing only, one per string set. The same drop applied to the chord's other close voicings gives more grips, but those are inversions of a drop 2 rather than of the chord, and that is a distinction worth more than it costs to explain.
strings 6–5–4–3
5–R–3–7
3324xx
4 notes · 3 frets
strings 5–4–3–2
5–R–3–7
x-10-10-9-12-x
4 notes · 4 frets
strings 4–3–2–1
5–R–3–7
xx5557
4 notes · 3 frets
Every voicing of one particular maj7 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 major 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.