How to use alternate chord voicings for guitar

Alternate chord voicings are an often overlooked element of the guitarist’s style. Using them effectively gives the guitarist a wider range of expression, a deeper source for invention and an ability to adapt better to the demands of different styles of song.

Creating Harmonic Movement in Chords

Knowing many ways of playing a particular chord, or a basic variant of that chord, allows the construction of chord patterns whose movement can have a melody of their own. There’s no reason that you have to grip that powerchord every time you need a G major, for instance, nor does your only option need to be the first-position “cowboy chord” variation if you seek instead a little variety.

If you are playing a simple I-IV-V progression in G , for instance, you can get a different sense of movement if you play the G, C/E and D/F# chords pictured below.

Don’t let the names of the C/E and D/F# chords fool you; these are simple major chords. The slash in their names tells you that a different note is functioning as the “bass” note, specifically the third, as in the third note of their respective major scales.

What a progression like this does is give you movement in the bass note that is independent of the the movement of the root. It is a kind of sub-melody, if you will, but you can also use voicings to create movement on any string.

Creating Dynamic Impact With Voicings

Sticking with major chords for now, remember that each one is made up of a root, a third and a fifth based on the major scale that corresponds to each. So, for instance, G is comprised of G, B and D, the first, third and fifth tones of the G scale. Considering that these notes can be played all over the fretboard, any combination of them counts as a G chord. See the diagram below for a great G/B voicing that makes use of the low strings.

This is just one of many, many different possibilities. This voicing is built using the third note of the G scale as the lowest, followed by the fifth, the root and then the fifth and root again, each an octave above.

Of course, only the first three notes are necessary to make this a complete major chord; you could add or omit these or other octaves depending on which degrees of the chord you want to stress. For more ideas, you can use the nifty Chord Calculator at Jguitar.com to build other voicings that will help expand your chord vocabulary.

More than just creating alternate melodies, voicings allow you to form full chords anywhere on the guitar. You can play that I-IV-V as a series of chords using only the three lowest strings, for instance, to create a muted sound, or the three highest strings to create a bright sound. This gives you control of dynamics completely independent from the actual chord you are playing.

The Harmonic Freedom of Alternate Voicings

Especially in a situation where there are a smaller number of instruments, using alternate chord voicings can allow the guitar to play a larger and more expressive role in the arrangement of a song. Of course there’s always a place for the simple voicings: barre chords, basic fifths or just single note lines completely devoid of chords if you like. The point is that there is no need for guitarists to limit themselves; you can approach the guitar like a piano, combining chords and melody lines, counterpoint bass lines, pedal tones and plenty more.

You can also construct voicings without any idea of what you are doing, just for the fun of stumbling on some bizarre cluster of notes that inspires you. The theory behind why something sounds the way it does may or may not interest you, but chances are the more you discover, the more you will want to know why what you are playing sounds so good.