SONGWRITING

Smoother pad parts with voice leading

Dave Clews offers up another ‘leading’ tutorial

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Here’s a MIDI part playing a four-chord progression – C, Am, F, Em, but all chords are played in root position. This means that the root note of each chord is at the bottom of the stack – ie the lowest pitched note. This gives a disjointed sound, as we jump about the keyboard following the root note of each new chord and stacking chord tones up from there. 4

So where next? This is where voice leading comes in. Good voice leading practice usually looks for the smallest movement possible pitch-wise between the voices within the chords. So if each note in our first chord is thought of as an individual player, what note could they each move to in the next bar to generate Am, the second chord in our progression? 2

Starting with the C major chord, we have four voices to use to build this chord. However, each triad only contains three distinct notes, so we can use the fourth lowest voice to play the root note of each chord in the bass register. What we have here – C-E-G-C – is known as a closed voicing, since all notes fit inside one octave with no space in between them. 5

The chord tones of Am are A, C and E, so our current top note of C has a few possible choices here. It could go from C up two whole tones to E, down three semitones to A, or it could stay where it is on C to provide the third of the Am chord. This works well if we’re looking for as little movement between notes in each chord as possible, so we’ll keep it at C. 3

Triads like this nearly always sound better played with open voicings, with notes spread over more than one octave, and decent space between. Let’s use what’s called a ‘drop 2-4’ voicing. Taking our closed voicing, number the notes down from the top 1,2,3 and 4. Then take notes 2 and 4 and drop them an octave. This takes us from C-E-G-C to C-G-E-C. 6

The next note down in our C major open voicing is E. We could shift this to A, but that’s a huge upward jump of five semitones – not ideal! There’s also the option of dropping it down four semitones to C, but since E is also already in the chord of Am, this note can stay put as well, to make up the fifth of our Am chord.

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The next note down, G, could either go up a tone to A or down three semitones to E. We’ll send it to A, as it’s not only a smaller movement, it’s also the root note of the chord. We already have the third (C) and the fifth (E), so the addition of this A as the root note means that our triad is now complete.

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The third note down from the top, A, can stay put, since it counts as the third of the F major chord, while the lowest note, being the bass note, has our permission to move the greatest distance pitch-wise, down a whopping four semitones from A to the root note of F.

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Our lowest note, the bass C note, can shift down three semitones to the root of the chord, A. This works fine because we’re using the lowest of our four voices to reinforce the root note of each chord, acting as a kind of built-in bass part.

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For the final Em chord (the chord tones of which are E, G and B), we could just drop everything down a semitone, but for a less obvious alternative, let’s revoice our chord slightly. Our top note, C, can drop a semitone to B, while the second note down from the top, F, can move up a whole tone to G to form the third of the Em chord.

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We move onto chord three – the F major chord. The chord tones of an F major triad are F, A and C. So going from the top down once more, our top C can stay where it is to provide the fifth of the F major triad, while the next note down, E, can shift a smooth single semitone up to the root note of the chord, F.

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The third note down can go up a whole tone from A to B, while the bass note can follow the example of the top note and drop down a semitone from F to E. With all four chords now voiced, we can use the colours to visually trace the individual melodic lines taken by each voice in the part, revealing perfect, smooth voice leading.