Dropping off
Let's now think about how we turn our M6 and m6 structures into actual shapes that we can play on a guitar.
We haven't ‘officially’ defined a formula for Major 6 chord yet1 so here it is:
- 1 3 5 6
Not very exciting, is it? Essentially it's telling us (refer to our latest intervals table) which notes to include above a given root note.2
If we assume that these notes are in ascending order and are confined to a single octave, the chord/arpeggio is said to be a ‘4-way close’ voicing. 3 Here is an example taking G as the root:
There are three other ways of arranging this formula that give us 4-way close voicings. These are known as ‘inversions’ of the original 1, 3, 5, 6 voicing. Here is an example of each:
| 3 5 6 1 | 5 6 1 3 | 6 1 3 5 |
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As you can probably tell, 4-way close voicings aren't terribly practical on guitars. Unless we include an open string (like in the examples above); play very high up the fretboard; or do something clever with harmonics, most of these voicings are all but impossible to play.
For this reason, other voicings are more commonly used on guitar. For now, we will concentrate on a type called ‘drop-2’, specifically those drop-2 voicings that appear on the four highest strings of the guitar.
So what do we mean by ‘Drop-2’? Well, if you take the second note from the top of a 4-way close voicing and swap it for the note one octave lower, you have a Drop-2 voicing. The following table compares the chord-tones (in ascending order) in each of the 4-way close ‘inversions’ with those in the corresponding drop-2 voicing.
| 4-way Close | Drop-2 |
|---|---|
| 1 3 5 6 | 5 1 3 6 |
| 3 5 6 1 | 6 3 5 1 |
| 5 6 1 3 | 1 5 6 3 |
| 6 1 3 5 | 3 6 1 5 |
Here is an example of each ‘inversion’ of a drop-4 major 6 chord:
And here are the minor equivalents:
These eight shapes may be the most important jazz guitar voicings you ever learn!
Most jazz music is based on combinations of musical structures that can be derived from 6 or m6 chords one way or another.4The eight shapes shown above are an ideal basis on top of which to build more complex structure and to understand how they inter-relate.5
Given the weight I have put on these shapes, it is only fitting that I give you some exercises to help familiarise you with how the different inversions relate to one-another in a stringwise manner. First the 6 chords.
B♭6
E♭6
And now the m6 chords.
B♭m6
E♭m6
Feel free to make up your own variations on these exercises. At the very least, you should try to figure out versions of these exercises starting on all the M6 and m6 drop-2 shapes given above.6
We'll be talking about these shapes quite a lot so we're as well to give them names. Although we could use ‘root-position’, ‘first inversion’ etc. these tie us to a particular chord type. Because the same group of notes can represent different chord types, depending on which note we decide to call the root, it'd be nice to have a means of referring to them that didn't tie them down in this manner.
I've found that the following scheme works well for naming these shapes.
In these names, ‘4’ stands for ‘perfect fourth’, ‘5’ stands for ‘perfect fifth’ and ‘T’ stands for ‘tritone’. The first character describes the interval between the notes on strings 4 & 3 and the last character describes the interval between the notes on string 2 & 1. Notice that any name that contains a ‘T’ is a m6 type shape and any name that doesn't is a M6 type.