EASY GUIDE

Give your chords wider scope with drop voicings

As far as putting together an ear-catching chord progression is concerned, there’s nothing wrong with keeping things simple and using basic chords. After all, most of the best, most-enduring pop songs are based on the simplest of progressions using just a few chords. However, that doesn’t mean that you have to stick to the original root position form of each chord every time. One way of switching things up is by using inversions, which I covered back in 217’s Easy Guide, but you can take things even further by applying a second technique in conjunction with this, known as drop voicings.

Drop voicings are a great way of spicing up what would otherwise be a fairly conventional chord progression. The basic idea behind it is to take a regular triad or four-note chord (or an inversion of one) and transpose one or two of the notes contained within it down an octave, or maybe even two octaves. This octave ‘drop’ significantly alters the sound and shape of the chord, opening it out and giving it a totally different, almost wistful character. In the steps below, I’ll introduce the basic concept of drop voicings and demonstrate how you can apply them to your own tunes. As always, you can find all the resources you need to follow along with this tutorial by grabbing the Tutorial Files from the Vault.