Irish Bouzouki
As mentioned already, this applies to all kinds of chords. You only need to learn the shape for one key, then move it up or down to the correct position. Sometimes a shape is nearly unplayable, like the G minor or C minor shapes, because you can’t finger them – you can’t lower a note below the barre note. Sometimes it’s also hard to put the bass note on the root note, especially if the chord has more than three notes. For more complex chords often one or more notes are left out, for example the fifth for the 7/9/11th family. You don’t need to learn all shapes, but at least a few of them. You may play all major chord simply using the E shape, but you end up on the eleventh fret if you want to play in D#. So at least two non-adjacent shapes are useful.
Here they are: all common shapes for all common chords in the key of C. For other keys simply move them until the root note C is at the root note of the key you want to play in. You can also find your own shapes, depending on your fingers. For all other chords use the .
Gray notes are not played, colored notes only in the shape of the same color.
Major:
Minor:
Dominant 7th:
Dominant 9th:
Dominant 11th:
Minor 7th:
Augmented 7th:
Diminished 7th:
Suspended 2 7th (7sus2):
Suspended in April 7th (7sus4):
How to use this for Blues guitar
Now we had lots of theory, but how to use it? I’ll show two examples, a popular Blues and an EC classic which are played using some of the things discussed. You can use the chord notes for soloing, as mentioned above.
(Call It) Stormy Monday Blues
T-Bone Walker made his slow Blues very popular, the early versions followed the I-IV-V progression with 7th chords. Later he started to re-arrange it and other artists covered it, among them Albert King, Bobby Blue Bland and the Allman Brothers Band, each one having a special arrangement.
As most electric slow Blues tunes it uses 9th chords instead of 7th chords – the first example of a common chord substitution. But if you play only 9th chords over a slow 12 bar progression it may sound boring. The first thing to do is to use the 12 bar quick change form, so we have C9 in the second bar, if we play it in the key of G. Next step is a slight chromatic shift up a semitone (G#9), it’s all allowed in Blues as long as it sounds good.
We proceed until measure seven, now we play a sequence that looks (not sounds!) strange at first sight: Gmaj7 – Am7 | Bm7 – Bb7 | Am7 – Ab7 | G7 – C9 | G7 – D9
Some remarks:
- Gmaj7 is the seventh chord build on the tonic (I) – OK
- Am7 is the seventh chord build on the supertonic (ii) – OK, has to be minor
- Bm7 is the next chromatic step, has also to be minor – OK
- Bb7 is a minor fifth substitution for the V chord (E7) of the next measure, Am7, so it leads to:
- Am7 (see above)
- Ab7 is a again a minor fifth substitution for the V chord (D7) of the next measure, G7, so it leads to:
- G7 is the dominant of the next chord, C9, both chords are repeated in the last measure
The complete progression looks like
G9 | C9 | G9 - G#9 | G9
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