Another chord that isn’t the easiest to use in a rock context but shows up frequently in jazz. Also referred to as the half-diminished.
sus4 Chords
Lots of overlap here with sus2 chords and easy to confuse the two sonically without resolution back to a major or minor. I personally overuse the two barre forms and don’t think enough about grabbing the odd suspended triad.
sus2 Chords
I can’t tell you I have a favorite sus2 form beyond the full barre with a 5th-string root, but working these out suggested some nice alternatives to work into progressions. In fairness, they are all triads, but I labeled the easy to grab three-note shapes as triads here.
Dominant 7th Chords
Dominant 7’s cover the last remaining core 4-note chord in the arsenal. I struggle to employ them effectively in composition as well, but this one is clearly on me. Dominant chords are the heart of the blues and jazz and are no strangers to rock.
Minor 7th Chords
Unlike Maj7 chords, I end up using the minor 7th all the time. Social distancing seemed like a great time to start mapping out a chord vocabulary, so here come all of the minor 7th chords I frequently use.
Major 7th Chords
I find Maj7 chords to be more difficult to use than triads or min7 chords, and I don’t seem to be entirely alone. Finding rock songs that feature the Maj7 wasn’t as easy as I expected. Here’s what I found: U2 One, Led Zeppelin The Rain Song, Paul McCartney Band on the Run, Peter Frampton Show me the Way, and John Lennon’s Imagine. In jazz, I’m pretty confident this would be a lot easier, and I’d also guess that if I’d scoured the Steely Dan catalog, I’d have come up with more good examples.
Easily placed or not, it’s a good place to start when it comes to cataloging voicings being the 4-note form of the first degree of the major scale. Below are all the voicings I find most useful for a Maj7.
Chord Template 1: Strings 3/4/5
I’ve spent a lot of time working on chords and harmony lately, and I’ve concluded that I really need a good roadmap to move up and down or across the neck to speed the up the composition process. The most obvious place to start that wasn’t the 6th-string bar chords we all know was the 5th-string-root shape that seems to come up first for dominant 7th chords or the Hendrix chord. There are a few fantastic voicings in here.
The m9’s of the second and sixth degree are a chord I’ve highlighted before, and the m7 of the seventh was frankly a surprise. It never occurred to me to drop the flattened 5th to create a less tense seventh chord of the major scale, but it seems more useful than just avoiding the seven altogether. I also really like the maj7(add9) and maj7(add13) you get in the root and fourth positions. There’s a load of color on tap in this template. I’m looking forward to connecting seamlessly it across strings and to a larger set of voicings.
