DISCLAIMER- You do not have to understand everything on this page to get started on the exercises, trying the exercises will help you understand the information on this page.

A 7th chord is a four note chord that contains a Root, a 3rd, a 5th and a 7th. Whenever you see a 7th chord, it some combination of these notes, certain notes may be sharpened or flattened (to make it major, minor or dominant), but it is essentially a combination of four tones.

A Shell Voicing is a chord voicing/shape of just the Root, Third and Seventh.

This is basically the process of stripping chords down the the key determiners of their colour; the third and seventh. Hence the name shell, it is a snapshot of the basic structure.

All kinds of complicated chords can be reduced to Shell voicing by just playing the Root, Third , and 7th. As guitarists, we can’t play 10 note voicings, so its important to understand how to reduce the harmony but still get the sound across.

Think of it this way, the difference between C Major 7 and C Minor 7 are differences in the third and sevenths of each chord;

C Major 7 = C E G B

C Minor 7 = C Eb G Bb

The third of the chord E drops to Eb and the Seventh of the Chord B drops to Bb.

As the Fifth  adds little in the way of colour, we omit it.

So there are two things we have to be able to do to master Shell Voicings

1. Learn The Shell Positions for all combinations of 3rds and 7ths. These are Maj3+Maj7, Maj3 + Min7, Min3 +Maj7, Min3rd+Min7)
2. Learn how to simplify complex chords to their Shell Voicings. What combination of thirds and sevenths do we need for a 7b9b13 chord? What do we need for a Min/Maj7 chord?

So let’s address number 1, learning all the necessary shell voicings, believe it or not there are only 2 basic positions we need to learn in order to be incredibly proficient, however, there are lots of further variations you can experiment with.

The first position is with the Root on the low E string, the 7th on the D string, and 3rd on the G string.

This diagram shows the root and the locations of the common 7ths and 3rds

The second position is with the Root on the A string, the 3rd on the D string, and 7th on the G string.

Things to Note 

• we are always putting our 3rds and 7ths on the D and G string, this is to keep the top strings clear to add extensions to later.
• In both positions, the b7 is always in the same fret as the root, 2 strings higher. Therefore, the major 7 is always up one fret and 2 strings higher.

Step 2 is a bit more complicated.

There are 4 basic combinations of 3rds and 7ths. We will refer to these as four families; Major, Minor, Dominant, andMinor+Major7. For the sake of simplicity we are going to focus on Major, minor and dominant families.

So here are the rules for simplifying complex chords to shell voicings, these work 99% of the time –

Anytime a chord says “Major” we will play the Major Shell Voicing = Major 3rd + Major 7th

Anytime a chord says Minor, eg Minor 7, minor 7b5, we will play the Minor Shell Voicing = Minor 3rd + Minor 7th

Anytime a chord says nothing, eg c7, c13, we will play the Dominant Shell Voicing = Major 3rd + Minor 7th

The only common exceptions are

• Diminished chords which take Minor 3rd and Double flat 7ths.
• 6 and 6/9 chords which take Major Shells not Dominant.