I've been working on the voice-leading exercise I was given last week. To recap, as each note in a chord is a "voice," voice leading is the artful movement of voices between chords to create a seamless sense of momentum, melody and resolution in the progression. Voice leading can be used to create comps that sound fluid and harmonically consistent, paying attention to how one voice melts into another, rather than simply flying all over the neck, relying on a set of memorized grips that don't really belong.
As the basic principle is to use the least amount of movement possible from one chord to the next, this exercise helps one figure out where to find the chords in the absence of familiar shapes. The aim was to take a iii, vi dom, V, I progression like Em7-A7-Dm7-G7-Cmaj7, and, using the same basic inversion for the Em7, Dm7, and Cmaj7 chords, build a smooth, linear progression between all the chords by finding fingerings for the A7 and G7 chords that are as close as possible to the others. So far, I've done it for three different string sets - 1-2-3-4; 2-3-4-5; and 2-3-4-6 - with four inversions per set, each inversion placing the root note on a different string. Here's a (handwritten in pencil) PDF of the results. Some of the progressions are nice and seem like they'd be really useful, whereas some are a bit of a nightmare to finger, and don't sound that good anyway. Still, a very good exercise for opening up the fretboard. All examples are in Cmajor, and the chords are all unaltered unless noted.
Andrew Green's Jazz Guitar Comping is my favourite book at the moment (see the inching moss of commercialism on the sidebar). It's got a long chapter on voice leading with a ton of examples and is especially good on working with the upper voice - the highest note in the chord - which the above exercise doesn't really attend to. There are various different things you can do with this voice depending on what you're going for: chromatic motion, for example, where the top voice moves a half step at a time; stepwise motion, in which the voice moves a scale step at a time; melodic motion, where the voice echoes the melody (as in chord-melody playing); or common tones, where the top voice stays the same while the chord moves underneath. Green likes to heavily alter the V7 to achieve some really jarring sounds. It's a pleasantly knocky antitode to all that melodious fluidity.