Voice Leading

Hello once again! In this tutorial we will be covering voice leading. In our example we will take a look at a common jazz standard and how we can approach the changes using drop 2 chord voicings with the proper voice leading technique.  We will be using drop 2 voicing off of strings 4-3-2-1 exclusively. For those of you unfamiliar with the term "drop 2", please let me explain... As some of you may know, it can be very difficult to build a 7th chord using stacked 3rds in a row, similar to that of piano voicing. Because of this anomaly we guitarists use a different set of voicings that make it easier on our fretting hand. The most common voicing types are the drop 2 and drop 3 chord voicings. Both of these have the same concept... We take a basic piano voicing, for instance Cmaj7:  C - E - G - B (in this case we have a guitar voicing for that but let me continue). To turn this into a drop2 voicing, I would then take the 2nd voice from the top, G, and lower it an octave thus creating a drop 2 voicing: G - C - E - B (2nd inversion with the 5th in the bass). Another example would be if we took a 2nd inversion Cmaj7 chord: G - B - C - E  After dropping the 2nd voice from the top (C) down an octave we find ourselves playing a very familiar shape. It’s a root inversion drop 2 Cmaj7 (C - G - B - E).  Please review further using the tab below.