Building Colorful Chords (JamPlay)

Chords are the foundation of harmony—but they don’t have to be predictable or stale. In Building Colorful Chords, celebrated fingerstyle guitarist and composer Trevor Gordon Hall gives you a fresh, intuitive framework for expanding your chord vocabulary and creating rich, expressive voicings that sound as vibrant as they feel to play.

This course offers a complete, ground-up exploration of chords from a guitarist’s perspective, helping you move beyond stock shapes and theoretical “rules” to build chords that are both musically interesting and uniquely your own. Starting with fretboard fundamentals, scales, and triads, Trevor shows you how to add extensions, open-string voicings, and creative inversions that bring new color and movement to your progressions.

Through a mix of conceptual lessons, ear-training exercises, and melodic etudes, you'll learn how to recognize the sounds of major 7, dominant 7, and minor 7 chords across different positions on the neck. Trevor walks you through both “bottom-up” and “top-down” inversion techniques, and demonstrates how to blend these shapes fluidly to add depth, variety, and emotional nuance to your rhythm and lead playing.

As the course progresses, you’ll apply everything you’ve learned in musical contexts—from custom etudes to reharmonized standards like “Silent Night.” By the end, you’ll not only understand how to construct more colorful chords, but you’ll also have the creative tools to use them confidently in your own compositions and arrangements.

Whether you're looking to breathe new life into your songwriting or deepen your understanding of the guitar’s harmonic potential, Building Colorful Chords will open your ears, sharpen your instincts, and elevate your playing.