began to practice this, I started to see the given
tonality light up across the entire fretboard. It
was like all the notes of the scale were bright
red and were equal candidates for expressing
the given tonality. From this perspective, any
combination of notes you play within those
seven pitches becomes available to you and
keeps your chords sounding fresh and agile. If
you improvise voicings like this for 10 minutes
a day for a week, two weeks, or a month, you
will start to have a completely different sense
of how flexible harmony can be, as well as an
appreciation for just how many harmonic possibilities exist on the guitar.
Another exercise that helped me to perceive harmony as a flowing and moving
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
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Fig. 4
Fig. 4
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Fig. 5
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phenomenon rather than a static event,
involves looking at things from a purely
mechanical point of view. Not only is it
important to hear the way harmony works,
but it can be helpful to train your hands to
feel comfortable with adjusting to constantly
changing harmonic terrain.
In Fig. 2 we begin with a chord shape, in
this case Cmaj7. Again, we set the metronome
to a comfortable tempo and practice moving
one note either up or down every four beats.
Like a spider crawling up the neck, the goal
with this is to work your hand all the way up
the neck and then back down in a fluid manner. Move all the way to the top fret of your
guitar and then back down to the 1st fret. Play
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around with moving your fourth finger up one
fret, then moving your third finger down a fret.
Then you can move your first up, your second
up, and then your fourth down. It is kind of
the fretboard equivalent of taking two steps
forward, one step back, however, with this you
are encouraged to try different combinations so
as to not ever get stuck playing a pattern.
The bonus is that along the way, you
might find some cool shapes that you haven’t
played before. And when this happens, one
thing you can do to maximize the results of
your discovery is to isolate the newly discovered chord, find out what tonal center it
belongs to—often there are many—and move
it diatonically through the appropriate scale.
For example, in Fig. 3 we start with a
D–G–B–F voicing, which can be seen as the
9th, 5th, 7th, and 4th degrees, respectively, in
the key of C. You can then move each note up
one step in the scale and continue this sequence
up and down the scale to find as many new
voicings as there are notes in the scale.
One final idea to play around with when
working on new voicings: Apply octave displacement, as shown in Fig. 4. I learned this
from the great guitarist Steve Kimock, who in
our lessons used to have me practice voicings
in all the possible octaves of the guitar. This
contributed to my understanding the fretboard
and allowed me to see that every voicing can
be totally transformed by simply relocating
to a new register. Additionally, you can play
around with moving only one or two notes up
or down an octave to alter the sound. Variation
is the heartbeat of creative chord construction
and this lends itself beautifully to the guitar.
For an example of how all of these con-
cepts can be applied to a tune, in Fig. 5
I’ve illustrated how I might comp over the
form of Elizabeth Cotten’s masterful classic,
“Freight Train.”
The key that unlocks all these meth-
ods of exploring harmony on the guitar is
understanding that chords don’t ever have
to be final. Every chord can be viewed as
arrested motion—or melodies in transit. A
four-note voicing is really four melodies that
are coming from somewhere and on their
way somewhere, and if you let the melodic
development of each internal voice suggest
what chord to play next, your harmonies will
always be relevant to what came before. This
approach will help your comping sound like
an integrative musical statement in and of
itself, independent yet supportive of every-
thing else that is going on.
