Do Guitar Chord Voicings Really Matter?

Pro tip: please watch the short video version of this post that I link to www.guitarsuccess4u.com/Voicings. It will give you a much clearer grasp of what I’m sharing here.

Abbreviated transcript and some tables included below…

---

What is something we all do with music, whether we are musicians or not? We listen to it.

How music sounds is pretty important. And yet for some of us guitarists, we can tend to play by shape, and perhaps sometimes take for granted some of the chords we learned early on, or assume that they’re as good as they can be.

I’ve got something that could shed quite a bit of light on your guitar voicing process.

This is a G Major chord. 

It contains all the elements of a G chord, the Root – G, the Major 3^rd – B, and the 5^th, D. But let’s not confuse the formula of a chord with the voicing of a chord.

Ready for a random analogy? My family likes to eat free range eggs. They’re healthier, for a start. This is because they’re from chickens that have more room to roam, rather than being confined to a small space.

Music notes also need more room, especially if they are lower in register. With this in mind, what do you observe about this G chord I’ve just shown you? Well, the lowest three notes are all crammed together. As a matter of fact, on a standard tuned guitar, it’s the lowest Major triad possible. And to me, it sounds pretty muddy.

YOU might prefer to play G Major like this.

The same problem exists, though, because those bottom three notes are still very close together. It’s still pretty muddy because of that low triad.

Because I’m limited by space here, I again encourage you to watch the video where I unpack open chord voicings for several other chords, and even show you what they look like on the piano.

If you watch the video, you’ll discover that at the bottom of each of the voicings, we have Root, 5^th, Root, and then we have the 3^rd, rather than Root, 3^rd, 5^th, etc.

Those chickens, er, notes, have room to roam.

So how can we give our muddy G Major chord a more open voicing?  Would you believe me if I told you it only takes two fingers?

Here’s the voicing I recommend:

The notes are G, I mute and skip the 5^th string, then D, G, B and G. The voicing at the bottom of the chord is now Root, 5^th, Root, and then we continue with the 3^rd and the Root, much like the other open chord voicings I show you on the video that accompanies this article.

Want to know how to play it on the guitar? Gently curl your fretting hand pinky (your 4^th finger) in toward your hand without bending any of the other fingers. Then, lay your hand across the guitar so you only fret the 3^rd fret of strings 6 and 1. Let your 3^rd finger mute the 5^th string.  And soon you’ll have it.

Are there additional benefits to this voicing and fingering? Yes. We have much more economy of movement from this new G chord to a C chord.

Still not convinced? When the 1^st and 2^nd fingers are freed up with this new paradigm, they can play part of a C Major chord on top of this G chord. It’s called a C over G chord, which works great for folk or fingerstyle guitar.

(The accompanying video has a cool demonstration of what’s possible with this chord.)

I hope this has given you a sense that even something as basic as an open G Major chord can be retooled just a bit to be made much more artistic. It sounds clearer, more elegant, and more pleasing to the ear.

See? We can always go back to the basics. Even those of us who have been playing for decades. So, yes, guitar voicings really do matter. 

Now, I’m not asking you to completely unlearn and relearn this chord. You can still use the other G chord shapes if you prefer. But finding different voicings for the same chord gives us more options, which leads to greater artistry.

And if anything I just said makes you grin and nod, you’re going to want to check out GuitarSuccess4U, where we go much deeper with concepts like today’s topic, but also color chords, fretboard knowledge, fingerstyle, flatpicking, strumming, capo strategies, scales and modes, and more.  And it’s all neatly arranged in a battle-tested format to help you get the most out of the tools, and more importantly, we talk about WHY they are important. 

And you get to do all of this in a community of like-minded followers of Christ.  Hop on board and see what you’re missing.  Head on over to GuitarSuccess4U.com.  I hope to see you inside the membership.  Thanks for experiencing today’s episode of Guitar Serious Fun, and I’ll see you next time!

P.S. Still reading?  I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I posted a mini-version of today’s episode in my Instagram feed and got over 3500% more views and likes than any of my other stuff.  I can’t put my finger on why.  Can you?