Jazz Guitar Chords: Voice Leading Major ii-V’s Video Lesson

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As guitarists, we all know how difficult it can be to get enough chords under our fingers to play through our favorite tunes and not sound repetitive. While sitting down and learning inversions for all the different chord types can be helpful, it is also often boring and not conducive to practical application.

One of the best things to do when learning chords is to practice them in common chord progressions and with proper voice leading. Doing so will not only keep things more interesting and practical, but you will cut down the time you spend working on learning your fundamental chord shapes.

In the following video lesson we’ll look at one of my favorite voice leading tricks that can help you learn to comp, chord solo and build chord melody lines over iim7-V7 phrases both quickly and easily.

Click to download the PDF Examples from today’s lesson.

Voice leading

The term “voice leading” is used to describe the movement of the notes of one chord to the notes of the next chord in any progression. For guitarists, this basically means that good voice leading means you don’t move your hand more than a fret or two between chords, and bad voice leading means you jump all over the neck from chord to chord.

In a iim7-V7 progression, we can use voice leading to make things very easy, and hip sounding, by allowing us to move only one note between the two chords, yet still sound both of the chords individually.

Here is how each not moves from chord to chord between any iim7 chord and any V7 chord, with the 9^th added in, using proper voice leading.

• Root stays and becomes the 5^th
• Third stays and becomes the 7^th
• Fifth stays and becomes the 9^th
• Seventh moves down a half-step to become the 3^rd

Notice that only one note changes, the 7^th of the iim7 chord moves down a half-step (one fret) to become the 3^rd of the V7 chord. That’s it!

So, let’s see how this voice leading trick can be applied to actual chords on the fretboard.

Drop 2 chords

The second example in the PDF is a collection of Dm7-G7 (iim7-V7 in C) chords placed on the middle and top 4 strings.

Play through each of these chord pairs, noticing that you only move one finger to morph the iim7 chord (Dm7) into a V7 chord (G9). This will allow you to memorize these chords as pairs. So the next time you comp through a iim7-V7 progression, you don’t have to think of a iim7 voicing and then a V7 voicing, these two chords have now become a unit with the voice leading working as the connector between the two chords.

These chords can also be used in chord melody and chord soloing situations. Basically any time you have a iim7-V7, no matter what role in the ensemble you are playing at the moment, you can apply this voice leading and it’ll always sound good.

Drop 3 chords

The next example in the PDF is a collection of Drop 3 chords in the key of C major, iim7-V7 (Dm7-G7). Again, this voice leading idea can be applied to any chord voicing you like to play, Drop 2, Drop 2 and 4, Drop 3 etc. So try them out using different voicings in different situations and see what you think about how each chord type sounds with this voice leading technique.

Also, move these chords around to different keys, all 12 if possible, and try taking them to any tune you’re working on. These tunes work great for practicing this idea since they have a lot of iim7-V7 progressions, but you can apply this voice leading to any tune you are working on.

• Tune Up
• All the ThingsYou Are
• Take the A Train
• Invitation
• Cherokee
• Lady Bird

7-9-b9 Variation

The last thing I’ll show you is a cool way of moving one finger to morph any 9^th chord into a b9 chord. Sometime you want to have a b9 chord instead of a normal 9, or you want to move from a 9 to a b9 over the same chord in one bar.

To do this, you start with the iim7 chord, move the 7^th to become the 3^rd of the V7 chord, then just move the 9 to a b9 and you’ve got it. In the PDF you’ll see how this works with a couple of voicing examples. After you’ve checked this out you can apply this approach to any/all Drop 3 and Drop 2 voicings from the previous example. Very cool sound!

Learning to comp chords through iim7-V7’s can sometimes seem like a daunting task, but with this simple voice leading technique, you are not only cutting down you time spent in the practice room on this material, but you are working up great sounding voicings at the same time.

Video Lesson

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