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7th Chord Inversions: Drop 2 Voicings

Mike Salow

Hello again! In this tutorial you will be learning the four drop 2 voicings for strings 5-4-3-2 (a-d-g-b). For those of you unfamiliar with the term "drop 2", it describes the theoretical action that takes place in creating these voicings. Imagine a piano; on piano if we were to play a Cmaj7 chord, root inversion, we'd have C-E-G-B or 1-3-5-7. This is a totally acceptable voicing on piano, however, this voicing can be difficult to accomplish on the guitar.  So one solution is the drop 2 voicing. In which we take the 2nd note from the top (2nd highest note in the voicing), in this case G, and drop it one octave giving us the following: G-C-E-B or 5-1-3-7. So if we were to do this for all four inversions we'd have the following:   Root Inversion 1-3-5-7 turns into 5-1-3-7 (2nd inversion drop 2) 1st Inversion 3-5-7-1 turns into 7-3-5-1 (3rd inversion drop 2) 2nd Inversion 5-7-1-3 turns into 1-5-7-3 (root inversion drop 2) 3rd Inversion 7-1-3-5 turns into 3-7-1-5 (1st inversion drop 2)   Onto the following videos where we'll apply this to Major7, Dominant7, and Minor7 chords.

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