Obviously this is not a new subject in anyway, but if you find yourself looking for new voicings this might be a good approach to find a few new sounds that you might otherwise not have thought off.

I’ve chosen to demonstrate this in the way I do this on the guitar so not leaning too much on theory, but then as a good exercise in knowing the fretboard and finding a solution to play a new chord voicing. I’ve also chosen voicings that I don’t have in a system already like drop2 or drop3 etc.

When I invert a voicing I list the notes in order of pitch so for the Cmaj7(9) hereunder, I think of them as C D E B. I use this order to move the notes, so that for the next inversion C will go to D, D to E, E to B etc.

This is what you’d end up with:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/128993145″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
And here’s the same approach to an Dm7(11):

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/128993142″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Which also demostrates that this voicing is an inversion of G7sus4

And a Dm7(9):

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/128993143″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Here I’ve changed the fingerings so that they are more playable. I changed the fingering when there are two chords in a bar.

What is nice about these examples is that you take get some new sounds and because of the choices of notes in the voicing you sometimes have nice big intervals which opens up the sound.