Memorizing more chord voicings doesn’t help you actually play songs.
The problem isn’t the chords themselves — it’s that you don’t know how to connect them and tur them into music.
In this video I’ll show you 3 things — how chords are built from the scale, how that makes them fit together in a song, and why some chords behave differently — so every chord you see makes sense and you know what to do with it.
If you’re struggling to remember chord shapes — playing one chord and then guessing how to play the next chord
Then this approach makes it easy to play chords and connect them through the song so the harmony just flows naturally.
And once these three things connect, learning songs gets a lot quicker — because it’s no longer about memorizing a long row of mysterious chord symbols.
#1 The Easy Way To Think About A Chord
Most guitarists treat every chord symbol as a separate thing to memorize. So when you see G7(13) on a chart, that’s one shape. G7(9) is another shape. G7(9,13) is something else entirely.
And every time you see a new symbol, it feels like starting from scratch.
But here’s how that actually works: These aren’t three different chords — they’re the same chord family. In this case, they’re all G7 in C major. And once you see them that way, you stop guessing and start knowing.
Here’s how to think about it. A chord isn’t a random stack of intervals — it comes from a scale. And the easiest way to find all the notes available to you is to stack 3rds up from the root in th scale.
So for G7 in C major, here’s your C major scale:
Start on G and stack every other note — G, B, D, F. That’s your G7. Root, major 3rd, fifth, and a flat 7. But if you keep stacking — A, C, E — you’ve got your 9, your 11, and your 13 sitting right there in the scale as the top part of the chord.
`The 11 — that’s the C — creates a dissonant interval against the B, so you leave that one out. But everything else is available. G7, G7(9), G7(13), G7(9,13) — same family, same scale, because it is the same chord.
And now you can mix up these different variations in your comping:
This means that instead of memorizing three separate shapes, you think one thing: “G7 in C major”, and these are all just different ways of using those same notes together.
As long as you know it is G7 in C major, the extensions are up to you, and you just read G7.
If you want to work through these examples yourself, I made a PDF with all the chords and extensions laid out for you. There’s a link in the description.
So now you can see what notes are in a chord and which variations you can use. But knowing how a chord is built is only part of it — because the next thing that makes chords easy to use in a song is understanding how the different chords relate to each other. And that’s where diatonic chords come in.
#2 Chords Belong To A Family
When most guitarists look at the sheet music of a song, the chords look like a random list of symbols with no connection to each other. Dm7, then Fm6, then Em7 — three different things to figure out, one after the other. And that’s exactly why playing through a song feels like guesswork.
But those chords aren’t random. They’re from the same family.
When you build a chord on every note of the C major scale by stacking 3rds, you get seven chords that all belong together:
C E G B – Cmaj7 (I)
D F A C – Dm7 (II)
E G B D – Em7 (III)
F A C E – Fmaj7 (IV)
G B D F – G7 (V)
A C E G – Am7 (VI)
B D F A – Bø. (VII)
And now look at a chart like Just Squeeze Me:
Most of those chord symbols are right there. Once you can see that, the chart stops looking like a list of separate problems and starts looking like one connected key.
So here’s how to make that practical. In C major you have two sets of shell voicings — one with the root on the A string, and one with the root on the E string. That’s it. Two exercises that give you the harmony of the entire scale.
Root on the A string:
And then you have the same set of chords but with the lowest note on the E string. Here I am starting on the F, the 4th note in C major:
This is also how you start to recognize patterns like the II-V-I —
Once you can see the diatonic chords, that pattern jumps out at you every time.
Now watch what happens when you play through the first part of Fly Me To The Moon using just these two sets of chords.
Am7, Let’s start with this Am7, root on the 5th string.
now the Dm7 with the root on the 6th string is next to it and moving from one to the other has a very smooth flow.
Same goes for moving to G7, and as you can see:
we are switching between having the root on the 5th and the 6th string, so the Cmaj7 is right here:
And the Fmaj7 is right under it.
Two exercises. One key. And you can move through most songs without stopping to figure out a single shape.
If you want to go deeper on this — adding rhythm, melody, and extensions to these shell voicings — My Jazz Chord Craftsmanship Course walks you through exactly that. There’s a link is in the description.
Now you have the diatonic chords covered — but not every chord in a jazz song comes from the scale. The most common one that doesn’t is actually pretty easy to figure out once you know what to look for. Let me show you.
#3 The Weird Dominants
You’re playing through a song in C major, the diatonic chords are making sense — and then you hit an A7 before a Dm7. It’s not in a diatonic chord, so what do you do with it. And suddenly the system feels like it has a hole in it.
But it doesn’t. There are just two dominant sounds you need to know, and between them they cover every dominant chord you’ll ever see in a song.
You already know the first one. In C major, G7 is the dominant — and as you saw earlier, stacking 3rds gives you a 9 and a 13 as your available extensions.
The second one comes from the minor key. In C minor the dominant is still G7, but now the scale is C harmonic minor:
Stack 3rds from G and you get a different set of extensions — a b9 and a b13. Same chord, different sound, different context.
So you have two dominant sounds. Major dominant — 9 and 13. Minor dominant — b9 and b13. That’s it.
Now here’s where it gets powerful. The pull a dominant has toward the tonic chord, so G7 resolving to C — that same pull works for any chord in the key. These are called secondary dominants, and they’re simply V chords for all the other chords in the scale that we can put in there.
And once you know the two dominant sounds, figuring out which one to use is simple: look at where the chord is going.
Let’s walk through All Of Me in C major.
Start with the A7. It’s resolving to Dm7 — and Dm7 is a minor chord, so this is a minor dominant. That gives you a b9 and a b13.
Next, the D7. It’s resolving to G7 — a major chord, so this is a major dominant. That gives you a 9 and a 13. You can even hear the 13, B, sitting in the melody twice.
Finally, the E7 in bar 9. It’s resolving to Am7 — a minor chord, so minor dominant again, b9 and b13. And the E7 in bar 3 behaves the same way because it’s pointing toward the same place, even though it moves through A7 first. ((_____ You don’t explain this in the video…)
Two dominant sounds. That’s all you need to handle most of the chord progressions you’ll come across in jazz.
Now you have the three things — how chords are built, how they connect in a key, and how to handle dominants that aren’t in the scale. The last piece is how to put all of that together so you can actually use it when you sit down with a song. And that’s what chunks are all about.
Don’t Spell Chord Progressions
Even after everything you’ve just learned, sitting down with a full chord chart can still feel overwhelming. Because if you read it symbol by symbol — Cmaj7, Bø, E7, Am7, Gm7, C7, Fmaj7 — it looks like a long random row of unrelated things to memorize. And that’s exactly where most guitarists get stuck.
But that’s not how you read it.
You group it. And here’s the last piece that makes that possible — secondary dominants can also have a II chord in front of them, just like the ii-V-I you already know.
So in C major, the secondary ii-V to Am7 looks like this: Bø, E7, Am7.
And the secondary II-V to Fmaj7, a major chord, is Gm7, C7, Fmaj7.
Let me show you how you can put this to use on a real song. I’ll use the 1st half of There Will Never Be Another You
The first two bars are Cmaj7 — that’s just the I chord, one chunk.
Explainer TWNBAY 1:
Then you see Bø E7 going to Am7 — that’s a secondary II-V to VI, one chunk, not 3 different chords.
Gm7 C7 going to Fmaj7 — secondary IIi-V to IV, one chunk.
Then Cmaj7 and Am7 are just diatonic chords.
And D7 Am7 D7 is a secondary dominant group pointing back to the V
and then home to C with Dm7 G7.
6 chunks. Not twenty separate symbols.
This is how you actually learn a song — not by spelling out every chord symbol one at a time, but by recognizing the groups and understanding how they fit together and how they move. Once you can do that, the whole chart makes sense before you’ve even played a note.
Remember that if you want a PDF of the examples I covered so you can go over them at your own pace, there is a link in the description
So now you have the three things that make jazz chords make sense. You can look at a chord symbol and know where it comes from, group the chords in a song into chunks instead of spelling them out one by one, and know exactly what extensions are available — so playing through a song is no longer about memorizing a random row of mysterious symbols.
But diatonic chords and secondary dominants are just the foundation. This next video goes further — more common chunks, and the kind of progressions that give jazz its colour and the small surprises that sound so beautiful.. The ones that make you stop and think “how did that work?”
Check it out!
Learn Jazz, Make Music.
The ONLY 5 Chord Progressions You Need To Play Jazz (That Nobody Teaches)
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