Jazz guitar voicings · Concept
Leave out the note somebody else is already playing, and spend the string on something that adds colour instead.
In a group with a bass player, the root is being played, loudly, by an instrument built for it. Playing it again on the guitar adds nothing and costs a string. Take it out and you have a spare voice — and the obvious thing to put there is the ninth, the thirteenth, or whichever tension the chord wants.
There is a second reason, and it is about register rather than economy. The guitar and the bass overlap for about an octave, and that octave is where arrangements turn muddy. A rootless voicing sits above the collision by construction.
A rootless voicing: F E A C, or b3 9 5 b7. The root is not played at all. In a group that is the bass player’s note, and leaving it out frees a finger and a string for the colour tones instead — here the 9. On its own it will sound ambiguous, which is the point: it is built to sit on top of a bass line.
A rootless voicing: F B E A, or b7 3 13 9. The root is not played at all. In a group that is the bass player’s note, and leaving it out frees a finger and a string for the colour tones instead — here the 13 9. On its own it will sound ambiguous, which is the point: it is built to sit on top of a bass line.
A rootless voicing: B E G D, or 7 3 5 9. The root is not played at all. In a group that is the bass player’s note, and leaving it out frees a finger and a string for the colour tones instead — here the 9. On its own it will sound ambiguous, which is the point: it is built to sit on top of a bass line.
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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Play a rootless voicing on its own and it will not sound like the chord you named. That is not a flaw in the shape, it is the shape doing its job: it is an incomplete object designed to be completed by a bass note. The same four notes over two different bass notes are two different chords, which is exactly why the device is powerful and exactly why it fails when you practise it alone.
A useful exercise: take a rootless shape, keep it still, and move an imaginary bass under it. The same grip becomes a dominant, then a minor seventh, then a half-diminished chord. Nothing in your hand changed.
A rootless voicing: C B D G, or b3 9 11 b7. The root is not played at all. In a group that is the bass player’s note, and leaving it out frees a finger and a string for the colour tones instead — here the 9 11. On its own it will sound ambiguous, which is the point: it is built to sit on top of a bass line.
A rootless voicing: B F Ab C#, or 3 b7 b9 #11. The root is not played at all. In a group that is the bass player’s note, and leaving it out frees a finger and a string for the colour tones instead — here the b9 #11. On its own it will sound ambiguous, which is the point: it is built to sit on top of a bass line.
A rootless voicing: E A D G, or 3 6 9 5. The root is not played at all. In a group that is the bass player’s note, and leaving it out frees a finger and a string for the colour tones instead — here the 6 9. On its own it will sound ambiguous, which is the point: it is built to sit on top of a bass line.
A voicing is rootless when the root is absent. That is the entire test, and this tool applies it literally: the label appears only when no voice in the shape is the root of the chord. Shapes that merely bury the root on an inner string are not rootless, however sophisticated they sound.
Solo guitar is the case where you should mostly ignore all of this. With nobody else playing, the root is yours again, and a rootless voicing will leave the harmony floating with nothing underneath it.
The finder builds these shapes for any chord symbol you give it, and filters for exactly this type.