fretprints guitar · improvisation · musicianship
Free guide for jazz guitarists
A six-string chord is mostly wasted on a gig. The bass player already has the root; the soloist is up top. Everything you strum in between is either supporting the music or stepping on it.
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The idea the guide is built on
Take the root out of a chord. Take the doubled notes out. What's left is three notes on three adjacent strings — and every one of them is doing a job, which is why they carry more harmonic weight than the six-string version they came from.
Then something useful happens. Because there's no root in the shape, what the bass plays decides what the chord is called. Two of the six grips in this guide answer to two names each:
The first pair is the tritone substitution, sitting in one hand. The second is why a suspended chord never needed its own shape — you already knew it, you were calling it a minor seventh.
What's in the PDF
Each one diagrammed, with what every note is doing inside the chord.
A real progression — a cycle-of-fourths run into a minor ii–V–i — built only from those six shapes.
The practice routine that gets the first four bars under your hands this afternoon.
How the same shapes travel to the other string sets and the other eleven keys.
Drop your email and the PDF is on its way. It's the same guide I'd hand a student at the start of a comping lesson.