Jazz guitar voicings · Concept
One operation, applied to a close-position chord, produces the grip most jazz guitarists spend their lives playing. Here is the operation, and what it gives you.
Write a four-note chord in close position: all four notes stacked inside a single octave. Number the voices from the top down. Now take the second voice from the top and lower it by exactly one octave. That is the whole definition, and everything else follows from it.
The dropped note becomes the new bass, and the spacing that results — roughly a third, a fourth and a third — happens to fit four adjacent guitar strings almost perfectly. That is not a coincidence anybody planned; it is why the shape took over. On this page every example was produced by performing that operation and then checking the result, which is why nothing here is labelled drop 2 unless raising its bass note by an octave gives back a close-position chord.
A drop 2 on strings 4-3-2-1: take the chord in close position and lower the second voice from the top by an octave, and this is the shape that falls out. Four notes on four adjacent strings, with B in the bass. It is the workhorse grip of jazz guitar comping because the voices stay close enough to move a fret or two into the next chord.
A drop 2 on strings 4-3-2-1: take the chord in close position and lower the second voice from the top by an octave, and this is the shape that falls out. Four notes on four adjacent strings, with C in the bass. It is the workhorse grip of jazz guitar comping because the voices stay close enough to move a fret or two into the next chord.
A drop 2 on strings 4-3-2-1: take the chord in close position and lower the second voice from the top by an octave, and this is the shape that falls out. Four notes on four adjacent strings, with D in the bass. It is the workhorse grip of jazz guitar comping because the voices stay close enough to move a fret or two into the next chord.
This tool hands you the shapes. It does not tell you which one to play behind a soloist, or what that choice does to the person listening — which is the whole subject of Jazz Guitar Comping.
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Any of the four notes can be the one on the bottom of the close-position chord before you drop, which gives four inversions. Each of those can sit on strings 6-5-4-3, 5-4-3-2 or 4-3-2-1. That is twelve shapes per chord quality, and learning them is most of what people mean by "learning the neck".
They are not equally useful. On the lowest string set the intervals are close enough to sound thick below the fifth fret, and the tool scores that down rather than pretending otherwise. The middle set is where most comping actually happens.
A drop 2 on strings 4-3-2-1: take the chord in close position and lower the second voice from the top by an octave, and this is the shape that falls out. Four notes on four adjacent strings, with G in the bass. It is the workhorse grip of jazz guitar comping because the voices stay close enough to move a fret or two into the next chord.
A drop 2 on strings 5-4-3-2: take the chord in close position and lower the second voice from the top by an octave, and this is the shape that falls out. Four notes on four adjacent strings, with B in the bass. It is the workhorse grip of jazz guitar comping because the voices stay close enough to move a fret or two into the next chord.
A drop 2 on strings 6-5-4-3: take the chord in close position and lower the second voice from the top by an octave, and this is the shape that falls out. Four notes on four adjacent strings, with B in the bass. It is the workhorse grip of jazz guitar comping because the voices stay close enough to move a fret or two into the next chord.
Because the four voices stay in the same register from one chord to the next, the distance a hand has to travel between two drop 2 voicings is usually one or two frets. In a ii-V-I the top voice often holds still entirely while the inner voices move by a semitone. That is the whole appeal: the shape is not more beautiful than any other, it is more connectable.
The progression search on the main page is built on exactly this. It does not look for good shapes; it looks for good pairs of shapes, which is a different problem and the one that actually comes up on a bandstand.
The finder builds these shapes for any chord symbol you give it, and filters for exactly this type.