It sounds brittle and impossible to mistake. Scarce enough that most players meet it as a passing sonority rather than as a chord they chose.
9 moveable shapes, 2 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 shapes changes — only the fret they start on, and each one starts somewhere different because they are rooted on different strings.
Showing CmMaj7♭5. 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.
8998x8
5 notes · 2 frets
89x877
5 notes · 3 frets
8x987x
4 notes · 3 frets
The other half of the pair. Pair them with the low E shapes and the hand barely moves: the root a fourth up sits at the same fret on the A string, and the root a fifth up two frets higher.
x3444x
4 notes · 2 frets
x3x442
4 notes · 3 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-10-11-12-11
4 notes · 3 frets
x-x-10-8-7-7
4 notes · 4 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 shape slides.
The base voicing only, one per string set. The same drop applied to the chord's other close voicings gives more shapes, 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
2314xx
4 notes · 4 frets
strings 4–3–2–1
♭5–R–♭3–7
xx4547
4 notes · 4 frets
Every voicing of one particular mmaj7♭5 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 diminished and half-diminished 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.