If you know your basic chords, it’s helpful to learn to build extended chords to give you more flexibility and depth on the guitar. This skill will help you to create new chords and enhance your chord progressions.

I recommend reviewing ways of playing different chords such as Major, minor, and 7th chords if you’re not confident with those yet.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to add notes to your guitar chords to make them sound fuller. Let’s get started!

What are extended chords?

Extended chords are any chord that includes notes beyond the basic 7th chord structure.

For example, a G7 chord has the notes G, B, D, and F. Those are the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and b7th degrees. Once you go past the 7th, you can keep adding notes above the octave: the 9th, 11th, and 13th.

You’ll hear extended chords across jazz, bossa nova, R&B, neo-soul, and gospel. Anywhere a chord progression sounds rich, extensions are usually doing the work.

See the charts below to understand how these extensions work on minor 7, Dominant 7 and Major 7 chords.

Building extended chords on guitar – Getting started

A great way to build extended chords is by starting with the 1st, 3rd, and 7th degrees of the chord, also known as shell chords.

Shell chords are great to know because they outline important notes in a chord. These chords use three notes: the root, the 3rd (which tells us if the chord is Major or minor), and the 7th (which tells us if it’s Major 7, Dominant 7, or minor 7).

These highlighted notes are also referred to as the chord tones, which change depending on the chord quality.

Shell chord examples

Before we build upon these types of chords, here are 3 examples of shell chords. The chord tones will be written to the right of the chord charts.

If you don’t know these already, see how to play shell chords on guitar.

Finding extended notes above shell chords

Once you have the shell chords down, you can simply look for available notes above the structure. Here are the same chords as the previous section with added extended notes.

This is just one variation of adding an extended note to the chord.

As a side note, you may hear these added notes called extensions or tensions. Chord tones (1, 3, 5, 7) are the structure. Extensions are the color on top.

Extended chord examples

Now that you have an idea of how this concept works, let’s explore more possibilities for adding extended notes starting on different strings.

The following examples are movable shapes that can be shifted to any root note on the string mentioned.

Major 7 extended chords on the 6th string

Major 7 extended chords on the 5th string

Major 6 extended chords on the 6th string

Major 6 extended chords on the 5th string

Dominant 7 extended chords on the 6th string

Dominant 7 extended chords on the 5th string

For Dominant 7th chords, experiment with flattening the 13th (lowering by a half step or one fret) and/or by raising or lowering the 9th by a half step for variations such as these:

• Dominant 7 (9, 13)
• Dominant 7 (b9, 13)
• Dominant 7 (#9, 13)

Or also:

• Dominant 7 (9, b13)
• Dominant 7 (b9, b13)
• Dominant 7 (#9, b13)

Minor 7 extended chords on the 6th string

Minor 7 extended chords on the 5th string

Minor 6 extended chords on the 6th string

Minor 6 extended chords on the 5th string

These are just some examples over 3 chord qualities but you can also try this with other chords you already know. On some chords, you can replace 3rd with 9th chord tones for more variations.

You can also try changing 7th with 6th chord tones which can be labeled as different chords such as Major 6 or minor 6 chords.

If you want a more in-depth look at these extended chords, I suggest checking out the guide on jazz chords.

Progression Examples Using Extended Chords

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Wrapping Up

As you learned in this post, building extended chords on guitar is not as complicated as it seems. You can take the chords you already know and look for new notes that act as extensions to the basic structure.

Try this: take a 2-5-1 progression in C (D minor 7 → G 7 → C Major 7) and play it twice. First with plain 7th chords then with an extension to each. Listen to the difference it makes. Try the same thing in different keys so you get comfortable using extended chords throughout the fretboard.

I hope this guide helps you to explore extended chords to add more depth to your playing. As you add new chords to your tool belt, you’ll have more possibilities when composing your own music.

Want to learn more interesting concepts related to chords? Check out this other lesson on how to play drop 2 chords on guitar.

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JG