Swing Guitar: Part Two

This is the second in a series of posts about beginning swing guitar comping.  This is also the basic outline of what is to come for a workshop at the Folk Alliance winter music camp here in Kansas City.  If you haven't already, make sure to check the Folk Alliance out and get registered for the camp.  It will be extremely worth it!

In the last post, we talked about our first set of chords.  These were a minor seven, dominant seven, major seven, and sixth chord.  In this lesson, we are going to look at the same chord qualities, only in a different fingering.

Here is the handout of this part of the lesson:

Again, memorize these shapes.  They are extremely useful.

Along with the new chords (top line), I'm also discussing the four possible inversions of the chord and the fact that the root is not always present or on the 6th string.

Inversions are an extremely important part of swing and jazz guitar.  In this genre, we don't learn on shape for every occurrence of a particular chord (like in rock you might always play G the same way).  Instead, we learn certain arrangements of chords and their inversions that we can mover around the neck of the guitar.

Inversions just means a different order of the same notes of the chord.  In the type of chords that we are looking at here, Drop 3 chords, we keep a bass note on the 6th string and play two more chord tones on strings 4 and 3. There are many other chord groups out there that use different arrangements of the strings.

For these chords, since we are using four notes (root, third, fifth, seventh) there are four different inversions.  On the handout, I show you each of the inversions which are used for each of the beginning bass notes (again: root, third, fifth, seventh).

So, why have the inversions at all?  There are really two reasons.  First, we can use inversions to keep chord close together.  This is a technique called voice leading, but can also just be thought of as economy (meaning, not having to move really far for a chord).  Second, when we get to a point of wanting to move a bass line around, knowing your inversions is the first step.

Practice

As I said last lesson, the best way to practice any new progression or new set of chords like this is to use the fifths.  I called it using the Circle of Fifths last time.  More formally, this is known as dominant cycles.  (Moving either in fourths or fifths.)

I don't want to glaze over dominant cycles (especially since it will lead us to one of our tunes in this series), so I will leave a better explanation for another day.

In the mean time, I went a step beyond this week.  Here is a Noteflight document of the chords played using a dominant cycle in four to the bar comping.

ii-V-I Dominant Cycles Drop 3 #2

Okay, if you have any questions on the lesson or any input, please let me know. I'd love to hear from you!

~Danny