Fancy Chord Re-voicing
June 21, 2020
| Guitar Articles
Sometimes when you play a chord, it may be in a similar frequency spectrum as another instrument, for example, you might be playing a solo on your guitar down in a lower register around the 3rd to 5th fret positions when another musician decides to play a chord in the same register. Not that this is a bad thing, but it can tend to trounce over the top of your soloing or get in the way, sonically speaking.
You might be able to get away with this with some extra volume or the other musician is being considerate with volume and dynamics but it would be great if you knew of a way to avoid this and provide some extra depth and dimension to the overall sonic picture: Welcome to the show, CHORD RE-VOICING or Chord Inversion if you will (not in the strictest sense of the word)
Basically, a chord inversion is, according to the Wikipedia Chord Inversions article is "A chord's inversion describes the relationship of its bass to the other tones in the chord.". Re-voicing is essentially the same thing just a different name.
On the guitar there are a couple of challenges to playing inversions but there are some simple ways to achieve this. Here is an example of a chord inversion technique that I use quite regularly. This allows not only for me to be able to be three dimensional with my chord selections, it give access to other sonic versions of a chord rather than simply going for the default "root position" chord voice.
Here is a chord, G7b13 which is one of my favourites to play as it adds tension and cool jazzy feel. It also sounds great when resolved nicely.
The G7b13 chord contains notes: G, B, D, F, Eb which has the chord formula of 1, 3, 5, b7, b13. This is basically the G7 chord with an additional b13.
For this specific chord inversion type, I've decided to use only FOUR notes of the chord. I've excluded the 5th (D) from this chord for this type of voicing on the guitar.
(Note, the D# in the chord chart has something to do with GuitarPro that I couldn't seem to solve)
The first chord above is the root position chord where the G root note is in the bass. The inversion of each chord is done laterally across the neck not longitudinally. The way the chord inversion is done is by finding the next available note from the previous chord on the SAME string. For example: To find the next position of the next note in the chord, you move laterally up the string until you locate the next available note. This may be any note available in the chord so long as its in the available notes (e.g G, B, F, Eb). You do this for EACH string in the chord, IE moving the position along the same string to the next available note in the chord.
In the first chord, it is voiced using the following order: G, F, B, Eb. The first inversion or voicing is B, G, Eb, F. etc.. You can see that the voicing has changed but still uses the same notes specified in its previous voicing. Each time you move the chord voicing along the fretboard, the chord is revoiced but still playing the same notes that say the song, composer or even soloist is expecting to hear.
This table shows you the notes how they appear for each voicing you create. Each voice uses the same string as the last chords notes, hence forcing the chord along the neck of the guitar laterally.
Root Position G, F, B, Eb 1st Inversion B, G, Eb, F 2nd Inversion Eb, B, F, G 3rd Inversion F, Eb, G, B
This is a great technique if you are looking to create cool sounding harmonic content without changing the chords' essence. Plus it gives you a way to play a chord in a different way that feels slightly different and provides a different sonic picture.
This technique works on all sorts of chords. The more notes the chord has available to create the initial voicing from, the more additional voices you can create simply by moving the voicing along the neck.
Currently there are no comments, so be the first!