The Guitar Grimoire Chords And Voicings

[Brian Bezdicek]

Everychord of every key and mode is presented with thousands of diagrams and charts. A unique feature shows you exactly what scale pattern to use for soloing over the chord you are playing. Includes polychords, chord substitutions, inversions and movable voicings. This indispensable volume belongs in every guitarist's library.

Carl Fischer Music's best-selling Guitar Grimoire series from Adam Kadmon has swept away all others in the world of guitar and bass pedagogy, and the new pocket-size edition makes it easier than ever for players to consult its wealth of information on the go. The new pocket-sized Carl Fischer Case Book Series now contains a guitar case-sized version of The Guitar Grimoire: Chords & Voicings Volume 2. The Case Book version contains the complete contents of the original, but has been rearranged and condensed to a more gig bag-friendly size. This volume is simply essential for guitar players, containing complete scales, modes, chords and voicings along with thousands of diagrams, charts, and graphs; a professional reference for years of use. "Why study from an imitator when you can learn from the innovator?"

When I first started playing guitar quite a while back, I bought the Chords and Voicings Guitar Grimoire, and promptly put it on a shelf when I realized I had a lot more to learn then just chord shapes.

I understand that they are the same chords, what I am not grasping is why this book which has other full barre shapes such as the 6th string minor7th, doesn't have this one and why the author chose to mute the 5th and 1st strings when they could easily be used.

This is purely an effort to confirm my suspicion that this shape was omitted by error, or to improve my musical knowledge so that I can understand why this chord isn't included when the back of the book states "Every chord of every key and mode is presented with thousands of diagrams and charts."

Basically, if I am missing some knowledge, I want to fill the gap, and if it is a mistake, I want to be able to put the thought to rest that I must be missing something and move on with my life! (Call it mild OCD).

The reasoning behind the chord voicing you found in the book is that it is a pure four-part voicing of a dominant seventh-chord, without repetition of notes. So you don't need any other strings to play that chord. Of course, the chord shape you suggest is well known and it sound good in most contexts, but it is redundant in the sense that it doubles the seventh of the chord (on the d and b strings), and it also doubles the root (on the high and low E strings).

Having said that, if there are also other redundant chord shapes in the book, as you suggested, then it is of course inconsistent to leave that one out. However, due to the large number of redundant chord shapes the author might have chosen to draw a line somewhere.

A few more words about the shape that you found in the book. It is a drop-3 voicing, which is very common on guitar. Drop-3 means that you take a close voicing, in your casef g b di.e. a G7 chord in third inversion (you could also start with any other inversion), and then you drop the third note from the top (the g) one octave down. Then you get exactly the voicing you found in the book. The advantage is that drop-3 chords can be played very easily, in all inversions and for all types of seventh chords. Full 6-string shapes do not exist (i.e. can't be played on a normally tuned guitar) for many types of seventh chords (and their inversions). Using that 4-string shape from the book, you can easily generate any seventh chord by appropriately altering the third, the fifth and the seventh of the chord. In this way you'll quickly find simple shapes for e.g. Gm7, Gm7/b5 (half-diminished), Gdim7 (full diminished), Gmaj7, G6, Gm6, Gmmaj7, etc. You will have a hard time doing this if you try it with 6-string shapes.

@MattL's answer is good, so I'll simply expand on it a little. It's worth noting that choice of chord shapes should be governed by a number of factors, and playing as many strings as possible is not necessarily the most important. Playing a chord shape that uses six strings will usually be loudest and most full sounding, but this isn't always what you want.

The last point just starts to approach the idea of voice-leading in guitar chord shapes, which @MattL also mentions in his answer. In other words, thinking about how every note moves to another within a series of chord shapes. Although this is not a particularly difficult concept, it can be rather involved to explain, and does in fact require moving away from "thinking-in-chord-shapes", so I won't go into detail about this subject in this answer.

To wrap up: when one starts learning guitar chords, it seems like we have a lot to learn, when compared to learning "the-single-notes" on either guitar or another instrument. But, boy, do we not even realise the half of it! Once we have learnt our major, minor, seventh, and then dim, aug, sus4, min7, and then 9th, 13th, m9th chords in every key (yes, I know I have only mentioned the smallest number of chords here!), we then realise we need to take into account all the points above, and should learn multiple shapes for each chord type. We need to take these points into account, so that we don't just use a chord shape that will work for a particular harmony, but the chord shape that will work best!

Chord shapes, or chord voicings as it might be better to to call them, are a truly fascinating part of playing and studying the guitar, as they truly seem endless. As soon as we learn new shapes and voicings to use, and how to use them, we start to realise just how many other possibilities there are.

Every chord of every key and mode is presented with with thousands of diagrams and charts. Includes polychords, chord substitutions, inversions and movable voicings. This indispensable volume belongs in every guitarist's library.

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