Use THIS To Make Your Chord Progressions Sound WAY BETTER
What is the best kept secret among professional musicians?
There are so many things that professionals do that your average simpleton normal people don’t... I could sit writing about it for hours, if not days, listing all these things — and you are far too busy for that.
Indeed, I am far too busy for that too ;-)
Instead, I want to share with you the biggest secret that pros use to make their music better, that you might not even have thought about.
The secret is voice leading.
What is voice leading?
Well, like I said before, it’s a secret. But now you know what it’s called. Thanks for reading. Ciao!
....Alright. I’ll tell you. But you can't tell anyone. If the Music Theory Secret Service comes rappelling through my window at 3 o’clock in the morning for this, just know that it’s your fault and I will never forgive you.
Voice leading is the process of making each note within a chord progression move as little as possible as each chord changes.
To do this, we need to re-organize the notes in the chords. This means that you can’t always rely on the barre chord shapes your grandma taught you, we’re gonna need to use some new shapes here.
So how do we actually use this? How do we apply it to actual songs? And how much of a difference it makes?
For that, go at the link below and I’ll explain everything you need to know.
Now, if you really want to master this concept, it would serve you extremely well to check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course. While I'll explain everything I can in the video, I can't go nearly as in depth as I do in this course. Check it out if you want to understand voice leading, and harmony in general inside and out.
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet! So nice to see you. One of the best kept secret of professional musicians is voice leading. Voice leading, it's one of those things that looks super complex at first until somebody clarifies them for you.
A student of mine asked me, how does voice leading work on guitar? Tell you what, guys, it's super simple. You're gonna see this video and you're gonna think, I don't know why I didn't think about this myself.
It's so easy. It's so easy at once, you know it. It's gonna be the obvious way of thinking for you. And this is how professionals think about chord progression, by the way, or one of the ways at least.
Okay? So a student of mine asked me how voice leading works on guitar? That's my answer and make sure to watch until the end.
So I'm a big fan of paying attention to voice leading and writing songs. and I've learned concepts of it by studying other people's songs like Billy Joel and people like that.
Just great songwriters, you know. I see how they use it in their songs. It's fascinating. I love it. My question to you is how... I'll probably end up getting your chords section to your chords course as well.
It is my chord course. It's in the first session. Okay. I mean, I start doing it in the first session, of course. Cool. Well, for the sake of this platform here, I'll just ask you anyway. What's a great way to approach learning those concepts voice leading with chords on guitar?
You look for chords that are close by. Voice leading on guitar, it's actually more natural, my opinion, than on the piano. Let's take the triads just to get started. Okay. Okay. You have the F here and the B flat here.
I suppose for instance to play the A, the F here and the B flat here. So if I play the A, the F here and the B flat here, I'm not really doing any voice leading. I'm just moving the shape up and down.
Right. it's called parallel transport, parallel transport, it exists, but it's still here, I don't like it this way too far, yeah, instead I'm picking the shape of F of Bb that is the closest one because I have on the first three strings, I have three shapes for Bb, I have one one is this, one is this, one is this, if I start from the F here, the closest shape for Bb is here.
Automatically I am leading the voices on those three notes, string, whatever, voices, okay the F stay F, the A becomes Bb, the C becomes D okay, there's more and more way too, so when you start thinking this way it's simply pick the chord closest by, pick the shape of the chord you want closest by, that's in first inversion of course.
Okay because then later you want maybe at the bass and like something like this okay we'll do it this way yeah now the bass is a typically so the if you're having four voices i have three top voices and the bass the bass is allowed to jump more than the other voices okay because we don't care about it our ear doesn't care too much about the big jumps in the bass why that will be a long explanation okay psychologically that's the way it works the bass can do whatever he wants the top three voices should be a bit stricter with the top voice being the strictest unless you unless you're playing a melody and do whatever you want.
Okay so it's just playing the closest chord now that's for triads if you start doing it with seven chords ninths whatever it's still the same deal okay. Suppose i have an f major seven okay and then i have a b flat minor seven and the major seventh i actually say the chords are still pretty close especially the top three voices are here and here they're pretty close right now of course you will have you will have to know the inversion of the major seven chord and all this kind of thing right it takes a little bit to learn all the positions but if you know the notes you can also figure it out in theory meaning you can do it this way.
Write all the notes of the f major seventh chord f a c e then write the notes of the b flat major seventh b flat d f a and then you have those four letters on one side those four letters on the other if you have the same letters you just connect them so you have a on both you just connect to means the A doesn't move then you have to look for pair of notes close by okay. So for instance the E in F major 7 is close to the F on the B flat the C is close on the F is close to the D on the B flat the bass jumps however you want okay and sometimes there's more than one way to connect these sometimes there's not only one solution but then you know what to do.
Because you just connected so you go like okay in my little piece of paper A was connected with A so these notes stays where it is these was going up one half step so this note goes here this was going up two steps to twelve steps because here and so you reconstruct the thing so you don't always have to have you in this case you'd be using a lot of inversions oh yeah it's like Tons of inversions.
Mm -hmm to make that happen to economically like short So that's very important. Um, but but you can also not you can also decide. Okay, I didn't doing that But the bass is the root. So I'm staying with position Okay, so that would just be in your songwriting choices and whatnot.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean if use the inversion here then the F will stay F because and then your your B flat major seven would be this one As opposed to Would that in the making slash chords and things like that?
Yeah, the joints cannot be made just in theory You will have to know how those things sounds and the best way to do it is to Write a voice leading see what it takes you played if you like it green check if you don't like it right cross And keep doing the stuff you like The learning of music theory cannot just be mathematics Is there a mathematical element?
Yeah, you can bet no problem But it cannot just be on paper mathematic abstract, etc. Because the ultimate goal is to make music I'm I'm of the school of thought that music theories don't is there to help us make music Which apparently is incredibly controversial today because people are like no It's because it's to record the experience of the past musicians.
Yes record them for what? Yeah Just because Yeah, I mean yeah to make music Otherwise, why are you even recording the experiences of the past musician? We have what they wrote that that's more than enough You know, no you are you are taking those things apart because then you want to put them together in a different way This was always the plan But for some reason now today is like you should not write song based on theory No, no, you should write song based on theory then use your ear to see if you like them and change them Otherwise, what's the point right?
I mean who's gonna study all the strange chord symbols and connections and concept to? not make music? No, sorry. So you do those things in theory, you play them, you listen, you do it again in theory, you play, you listen.
Before you know, you start associating what you do in theory with the sound and so you know how to get the sound you have in mind. But this starts, so you build up starting from the theory. Later when you write, you start from the sound that you have in mind and you connect it with the other thing you know.
It's this kind of process you put in, so write a theory, listen to the sound, put in information and the information just starts to come out, okay, and it's just like, I know, that's how they want, it's just this inversion, in this position, blah blah blah.
It's like a feedback loop. Yes, exactly, exactly. Fantastic. That's how it works. Great, well I'll be getting a chord course probably today. Works for me, thank you Colin. Yeah man, works for me too, thank you very much.
Thank you. Complete chord mastery, it's not a book, it's a complete video course that takes you from the basics. up. We do everything you need to know about harmony and chords on your guitar. All the theory is done straight on the fretboard, there is no theory for the sake of theory here, everything is immediately practical and everything is developed through exercises, so you know how to apply these immediately on your guitar.
If you have just a minute, click on the link on the top right to check out Complete Chord Mastery. If you like these videos, smash that like button and don't forget to subscribe and click on notification, otherwise YouTube will not let you know when I put up a new video.
And if you have any comment, feedback, suggestions, write them down in the comments, I enjoy reading from you and I make videos on your suggestions. This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com and until next time, enjoy!