If you are getting into some of the rich sounding Jazz chords on the guitar and want to use that in your playing then one thing that can really add a lot more life and color to your chord playing is to start using rootless Jazz chords.
Playing Rootless Jazz chords in your chord melody, comping and chord soloing will give you 10x as many options and also really start to free you from thinking static grips and more work with playing progressions that flow into one another.
And it is pretty simple to get into…
Basic Example with Chords Already You Know
You probably already know these chords:
Making these chord voicings that you already know into rootless voicings is really simple:
Now you are probably asking what is the big deal? They are a little bit easier to play but for the rest it doesn’t really matter.
Advantages to Rootless Voicings
There are two advantages to using rootless voicings:
1 If you are in a band then you want to stay out of the way of the bass player, and constantly having the root in that register is often clashing with the bass player which is not so nice for you or the bass player.
2 You have a lot more freedom to improvise with the notes when you don’t have to play the root. I am going to give you a lot of examples of this in the video, but if we take the example from above then you could start working on changing the top note of the chords and get some really great sounding chord movements That’s what I am going to cover next.
Making Easy variations to the chords
In this example I am using other melody notes from the scale that are easy to add to the chord. The examples are all practical and pretty easy to play
But there is one note that is added in there which is the b9 which acts as a chromatic leading note in the G7 to the 5th of Cmaj7. This is another way to understand alterations on dominants.
And you can go a lot further than this by adding notes on the top string as well, which is now a lot easier:
And with this you can also start to make movement inside the chord and make the different voices move independently. That’s the next thing to explore
Voices not chord grips
Let’s try this with another set of chords that you probably already know:
This can be turned into this set of rootless voicings:
And a basic variation of this could be something like this:
Notice how I am again using a b13 as a chromatic leading note to go from E down to D on the Cmaj7.
Another thing to notice is that I am only playing the chord once and then moving the melody on top while the other notes are sustaining, this gives it more of a polyphonic or even orchestral sound.
And you can expand on this quite easily adding more movement in the voices, especially G7:
Chromatic inner-voices
The next thing to start experimenting with is adding chromatic movement in some of the lower voices not just moving the melody.
Here I am adding the melody C A# to lead to the B on G7 and a great chromatic movement from B to Bb to A moving the maj7th to the maj6th
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