Learn Guitar Chords In Just Over A Month

Submitted by: Alex Cortes

As an aid to help you learn guitar chords as quickly as possible, I ve made this brief summary of the different kinds of 7th chords, their inversions and voicings, available on the guitar fretboard.

7th chords: M7, m7, 7, b5m7, dim

I ll take it for granted in this article that you already know the 5 basic 7th chord-types. I will use CM7 for all the following examples, just for the sake of simplicity.

Block Voicings

What Block Voicing means is to have all the notes that make up a chord as close as they can be, regardless of inversion.

Example in 1st inversion: C E G B

Example in 2nd inversion: E G B C

Example in 3rd inversion: G B E C

Example in 4th inversion: B C E G

Sadly, only a handful of Block Voicings are playable on guitar, so this is not really a usable resource. The reason is simple: If you try to play 1 3 5 7 on contiguous strings, you’ll have to stretch your fingers beyond what is comfortable.

Try it out by playing C on the 8th fret of the 6th string, E on the 7th fret of the 5th string, G on the 5th fret of the 4th string, and B on the 3rd fret of the 3rd string. Ouch.

Drop 2 Voicings

Drop 2 Voicings are the first playable 7th chords available on the guitar fretboard. What “Drop 2” means is that you take the second note of the chord, up from the lowest, and “drop” it all the way to the top (I know what you re thinking: but I didn t invent these names 😉

Example in 1st inversion: C – G B E

Example in 2nd inversion: E – B C G

Example in 3rd inversion: G – C E B

Example in 4th inversion: B – E G C

The blank shows the position where the “dropped” note initially was. It does not mean to skip a string: on the contrary, Drop 2 Voicings are the closest thing we guitarists get to Block Voicing.

Try it out by playing C on the 8th fret of the 6th string, G on the 10th fret of the 5th string, B on the 9th fret of the 4th string, and E on the 9th fret of the 3rd string.

Drop 3 Voicings

Drop 3 Voicings are also playable on guitar. “Drop 3” means we drop the second voice up from the bottom, plus the third voice, up from the bottom. In this case, though, we do skip a string from the lowest note to the next up.

Example in 1st inversion: C – – B E G

Example in 2nd inversion: E – – C G B

Example in 3rd inversion: G – – E B C

Example in 4th inversion: B – – G C E

Try it out by playing C on the 8th fret of the 6th string, B on the 9th fret of the 4th string, E on the 9th fret of the 3rd string, and G on the 8th fret of the 2nd string.

Drop 4 Voicings

Sadly, most Drop 4 Voicings are unplayable on guitar, for the same reason that most Block Voicings are. As you can probably deduce from the previous examples, the Drop 4 Voicings of CM7 would look as follows:

Example in 1st inversion: C – – – E G B

Example in 2nd inversion: E – – – G B C

Example in 3rd inversion: G – – – B C E

Example in 4th inversion: B – – – C E G

Try it out by playing C on the 8th fret of the 6th string, E on the 9th fret of the 3rd string, G on the 8th fret of the 2nd string, and B on the 7th fret of the 1st string. Good luck with that! Unless you have 6 fingers, I don’t see how you could make this work in practice.

Learn Guitar Chords: 100 fingerings

So, we have only 2 basic ways of fingering 7th chords on the fretboard: Drop 2 Voicings, and Drop 3 Voicings. Each is available on a different number of string combinations, as follows:

Drop 2 Voicings

Strings 6, 5, 4 , 3

Strings 5, 4 , 3, 2

Strings 4, 3 , 2, 1

Drop 3 Voicings

Strings 6, 4, 3, 2

Strings 5, 3, 2, 1

That s it. So if you do the math, there are 12 kinds of Drop 2 Voicings and 8 kinds of Drop 3 Voicings. 20 in all. Multiply that by 5 (the number of 7th chord-types) and you get 100 basic fingerings to learn…

Learn Guitar Chords in 33 days

If you learn 3 out these 100 voicings every day, in only 33 days you will have learned 99. Learn one more on day 44, and you’re done!!! Given that the fretboard follows a certain logic, and that these chords and voicings are also inter-related, it should be a cinch to learn guitar chords in just over a month.

Note on the range of the guita

To sound good, it isn’t enough to just learn guitar chords: not all 7th chords available on the guitar fretboard sound great. If you play a Drop 2 m7 chord on the low G on the sixth string, it is likely to sound muddy . Try and think the way keyboard players think, distributing their chords is such a way that they sound better. The simple rule of thumb is to try to avoid Drop 2 Voicings on the low side, as they tend to sound much better in the higher string combinations. If you have to go that low, use Drop 3 Voicings instead. Please don’t just learn guitar chords and leave it at that. Learn guitar chords, but more importantly, learn how to use them!

About the Author: Alex Cortes, highly accomplished guitar player, helps you learn guitar chords:

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Learn all there is to know about guitar theory by visiting

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