There seems to be some kind of thing happening in regards to teaching chord voicings for the guitar, big clunky voicings.
When learning to play we typically all start out with what I’ll call open voicings, meaning basic chords containing open strings, cowboy chords as some of my teachers used to jokingly call them. Typically played within the 1st few frets of the fretboard and then move on to barre chords. This is pretty normal and a good place to start. When I comes to jazz guitar however, I’ve seen many teachers hot students with immediately with drop 2 and 3 voicings and their inversions. The students end up struggling to play them and pretty much anything play sounds like crap because they can’t finger the voicings quickly enough to play anything in time. For a beginner or intermediate student these voicings take months to get down. Not to mention they 100% have to have voice-leading applied to them or they sound horrible. This isn’t the place start.
In the real word you could voice-lead your way through thousands of songs, sound like a pro and never have to play any of these voicings. That’s not to say you shouldn’t learn them. You should, they’re useful I use them myself when playing solo guitar. In group settings I tend to avoid them to keep out of the bassists way. Guitar and bass do overlap in register, if the bassist isn’t experienced working with a guitarist using these voicings can be an aural nightmare.
To start off learn the basic barre chords. Once you’re cool with that you should be learning guide-tones, root, 3rd and 7th. With roots on the 6th, 5th and 4th strings. Once your got those down, get rid of the roots. Yeah, that’s it just 2 notes. Leave the roots/inversions to the bassist. Next learn to add extensions to those. b9,9,#9,#5(b13),b5(#11).
Learn how to voice lead them, it’s not as difficult as it sounds. It also makes it easier to see the lines moving between chords. A lot of them can be played with only 2 or 3 fingers and no barre. It’s a tremendous aid to improvising because you see exactly where all of these notes(extensions) are in relation to the chords. The big bonus is in a relatively short amount of time you’re equipped to handle comping for just about any song thrown at you and make it sound good.
After that’s down, worry about learning voicings that require more complex fingerings and difficult stretches. Learning any instrument is lifetime endeavor. But just being able to play the chords to a song and make it sound good shouldn’t be.