You could also do traditional written notation. One way is tab, and that's a really popular way to explain guitar music. If you do have to talk about it, you'll need to pick some way of communicating what you played. You can do whatever it is that you want to do. If it's just you at home, and there's nobody to talk to, you don't have to give the chord a name at all if you don't want to. 2 has a D9 chord? Music theory in this example is really a means for communication to the outside world. I wondered what theory was good for, and why it mattered that Ex. I was just moving a finger here and there, picking notes that connected the chords, and grounding it all with things that sounded good. Many of these moves that I was doing in my progressions were actually really simple to explain if I didn't have analyze them with traditional music theory. This is one of the things that I was wrestling with as I was working out the arrangement. The downside is that you made the chord more complicated to name. The good news is that by changing your D7 chord to have an E as the highest note, you've made a more advanced V chord with interesting voice leading that sounds better. Don't think about it any deeper than that. Don't change any of the other notes in the chords. Just take the D7 chord you know and love and change the highest note from D to E. If we think about it as notes, it might get a little confusing, but if we look at closer, it's actually really simple. Let's connect the Am7 and D7 chords by keeping the E the same between the two chords. The top voice started with an E in the Am7, went down to a D in the D7, and then stayed put as a D in the Gmaj7. To begin with, let's just focus on the highest note in the chords, which in the case of Ex. This is called voice leading, and while you can get quite advanced about this, you can also do some incredibly simple voice leading that make a big impact. A simple way that you can make your chords sound a bit more interesting is to connect the chords together in the smoothest way possible.