When Two Worlds Collide
You may have been reading the previous lesson and thinking to yourself, “Isn't it a shame that there are five basic arpeggio shapes ([6], [5], [4], [3] and [2]) for any given major or minor sixth chord, but only four drop-2 voicings? How can we possibly reconcile these seemingly contradictory facts?” Fear not, dear reader, the square peg, as it turns out, fits firmly into the pentagonal hole, as we shall see...
For Major 6 chords:
- the 5-4 drop-2 shape corresponds with the [6] arpeggio shape
- the 5-5 drop-2 shape corresponds with the [4] arpeggio shape
- the 4-5 drop-2 shape corresponds with the [2] arpeggio shape
- the 4-4 drop-2 shape corresponds with the [5] and [3] arpeggio shapes
Simple as that! 4-4 just gets shared between [5] and [3].
Each of our 5 M6 arpeggio shapes now has a ‘signature’ drop-2 shape associated with it. Let's look at a couple of examples to illustrate this. In the diagrams below, the large box on the left shows the full 6-string, 13 (or 14)-fret arpeggio for a 6 chord. We'll call this the super-shape.1 The boxes to its right divide this into overlapping arpeggio shapes. Within each of these arpeggio shapes is a single drop-2 shape (the black note with white text.)
For m6 chords, similar relationships exist:
- the 5-T drop-2 shape corresponds with the [4] arpeggio shape
- the T-5 drop-2 shape corresponds with the [2] arpeggio shape
- the 4-T drop-2 shape corresponds with the [5] arpeggio shape
- the T-4 drop-2 shape corresponds with the [3] and [6] arpeggio shapes
Again, let's look at a couple of examples.
Notice how each arpeggio shape in the above diagrams shares about half its notes with one of its stringwise neighbours and the rest with its other stringwise neighbour. 2 Between the [5] & [3] 6 shapes and the [3] & [6] m6 shapes, these ‘shared’ notes constitute the drop-2 chord within both arpeggio shapes (the 4-4 and T-4 shapes respectively). It is this facts that allows us to reconcile the five arpeggio shapes with the four drop-2 voicings.
Just looking at the diagrams above makes it obvious how much easier it is to think in terms of drop-2 voicings than to try to consider the super-shape as a single entity (and that's before we've added anything more complicated to it). The drop-2 shapes help us navigate along the supershape as well as allowing us to focus in on any area of it.
After learning how these voicings lie on the fretboard it becomes much easier to become properly familiar with more complex scales, arpeggios etc. Expanding a drop-2 shapes into its parent arpeggio shape is just a matter of adding two or three notes3 and this quickly becomes second nature. These arpeggios, in turn can be expanded into scales and modes by adding more notes.4 Because the same shape can represent multiple chord types, we can relate the vast majority of the raw materials of Jazz melody and harmony to these eight5 shapes. This becomes immeasurably more valuable when we start thinking in terms of chord changes as opposed to individual chords.
Incidentally, The principles that we are building up have can be expanded to work with just about any kind of voicing for 6 and m6 chords. In fact, we could have built broadly the same model using drop-2 voicings on the middle or bottom sets of strings, or indeed using drop-3, drop-2&3, drop-2&4 or drop-4 voicings.6 but the drop-2 voicings on the top four string seem like the best place to start.7
If ‘sharing’ the 4-4 and T-4 shapes with two parent arpeggio shapes gives you cause for concern, rest assured that is almost always obvious from context which arpeggio shape it is acting as a subset of. If you're not the kind of guitarist who always uses the same fingering for a given shape, you'll also find that you tend to finger them differently.8