It sounds full and wide open. Everything the major scale offers except the eleventh, which is left out because it fights the third.
7 moveable shapes, 3 of them drop 2. None has an open string in it, so each one plays every root there is; the dots are degrees, and R is the root.
Pick a root and every diagram below moves to it. Nothing about any of the grips changes — only the fret they start on, and each one starts somewhere different because they are rooted on different strings.
Showing Cmaj13. Every voicing of it, open strings included, is on its own chord page.
The lowest root available, so these are the fullest-sounding shapes and the ones that carry a band. F at the first fret, G at the third, A at the fifth: the shape is the same and the fret is the whole of the difference.
8-8-9-9-10-8
6 notes · 3 frets
877787
6 notes · 2 frets
The other half of the pair. Almost every progression is played by alternating these with the low E shapes, because a root a fourth up the neck is a root two frets along the string below — the hand barely moves.
x33455
5 notes · 3 frets
The same chord with something other than the root underneath. You reach for one of these because of what the bass is doing, not because of what the chord is — a bass line that walks while the harmony stays put is made of these.
13 in the bass.
13 on the A string, root on the D string
x-12-10-10-12-12
5 notes · 3 frets
Close position — R–3–5–7 and its rotations — puts four notes inside an octave, which will not fit under a hand on adjacent strings. Drop the second voice from the top down an octave and it does. That is the whole operation, and it is why these exist: four notes, four adjacent strings, no gap to reach over, and the grip slides.
The base voicing only, one per string set. The same drop applied to the chord's other close voicings gives more grips, but those are inversions of a drop 2 rather than of the chord, and that is a distinction worth more than it costs to explain.
strings 6–5–4–3
13–R–3–7
5324xx
4 notes · 4 frets
strings 5–4–3–2
13–R–3–7
x-12-10-9-12-x
4 notes · 4 frets
strings 4–3–2–1
13–R–3–7
xx7557
4 notes · 3 frets
Every voicing of one particular maj13 chord — including the open-string ones that do not move — is on that chord's own page, linked under each shape above. All the moveable shapes for every quality are on the shapes index, and the major chords as a family are on their own page.
Shows each chord the way this style would voice it, and marks which of its alternatives belong to the idiom.