If you give a simple chord progression to a dozen guitarists, there’s a good chance that half of them will play it the exact same way. That’s because guitar players often just memorize chord shapes instead of learning how to build or arrange chords.
But here’s the problem: when you compose this way, you’re completely ignoring the rich world of harmony that exists within voice leading, which is explained in the video up top. Learning this topic will not only allow you to write more rich and engaging progressions, but will also enable you to start arranging music in 3 or 4 part harmony, perfect for a choir or quartet.
What is Voice Leading?
Voice leading simply refers to the motion of individual notes within chords and following that motion throughout a chord progression. When we compose using voice leading, we’re not just thinking “chord x, then chord y, then chord z.” We’re instead thinking about the notes within those chords, and how they smoothly and clearly lead to the next chord in the progression.
Think of a chord progression as composite voices, where each voice has its own independent movement and action. This is a huge topic in music theory – there are entire college degrees based on it and many formalized rules. But instead of diving into all those rules, I want to give you the basic concepts and tools to explore this on your own.
Concepts To Know
By the end of this lesson, we’ll have arranged a simple chord progression into 3-part harmony. Before we do that though, there’s a few concepts we should know first.
“Melodic Momentum” Helps Resolve To Chords
Motion exists whenever you have notes, or chords, playing in sequence. When notes move up smoothly (in half steps or whole steps), they create an expectation for more ascending movement – there’s a melodic attractor pulling us upward. The same works in reverse: smooth downward motion pulls our ear downward. Small movements (half steps, whole steps, even minor and major thirds) feel smooth and trackable. Larger intervals like fifths start to feel jumpy rather than smooth.
Harnessing this momentum allows us to strongly resolve toward chords, and make each chord feel like it’s “wanted,” instead of just appearing from nowhere.
Neighbor Tones
If you want to strongly arrive at a chord, one thing you can do is first play its neighbor tones (even if they aren’t in the key). Neighbor tones are the notes that are right next door to the notes in our chord, either a half-step or whole-step in either direction. For example, a C major chord (C-E-G) contains the following half-step neighbor tones:
- Neighboring C: B and C#
- Neighboring E: E♭ and F
- Neighboring G: G♭ and G#
C also has three other neighbor tones, found a whole-step away from each chord:
- Neighboring C: Bb and D
- Neighboring E: D and F#
- Neighboring G: F and A
Try playing any of these notes before sounding out a C chord. You might feel a sense of off-balance, or dissonance, that quickly “snaps into place” once the full C chord is played. When we’re arranging chord progressions, it’s a good idea to try to use neighbor tones to help us resolve to the next chord.
Expendable Fifths
When you’re playing a major or minor chord, it’s supposed to contain a perfect fifth by default. However, you should find that even if you don’t play that note, the chord’s true color and mood still shines through brightly. The fifth only adds a bit of stability and extra thickness to the chord’s overall sound.
This means you don’t always have to voice the fifth when producing a chord, and can choose to drop it out completely to allow for better voice leading. Also, your chord may contain 4 notes (like a 7th chord) but your arrangement only has three voices to create that chord. In this instance, you’ll have to sacrifice a note, meaning the fifth is likely to get dropped.
Types of Motion
When chord x moves to chord y, the voices inside might demonstrate different kinds of musical motion. The three we want to know are as follows:
Parallel motion
Voices moving in the same direction at the same interval. In this example of G7 moving to C, we see two notes both moving down together in parallel. The highest note moves down a minor second, and the next note moves down a major second. Since these are both types of musical seconds, this motion is parallel. If one of the notes is moving by a larger interval, the motion is no longer considered parallel but is instead called similar.
Similar motion
Just like parallel motion, but the interval classes aren’t the same. Here, within that same movement from G7 to C, we see one voice descending a whole step while the other descends a major third.
Contrary motion
Voices moving in opposite directions. This can happen inward, or outward as displayed:
Oblique motion
One voice moves while another stays the same.
Example Progression
Here’s a simple progression you’ve heard thousands of times: IV – V – I in the key of C. We’ll start with this simple set of chords and arrange it into three voices, then examine more voice leading principles.
Instead of just playing this chords on our instrument, we’ll arrange it into a three-part harmony. That means we’ll use three different instruments (or voices) to produce the notes of each chord. We could start by having one voice only play the lowest note of each chord. This motion isn’t very smooth, and contains a big jump from G to C.
Bass voice (Blue): Simply play the root notes: F – G – C
Next, we’ll choose another note from each chord to be played by another voice.
Middle voice (Pink): Start on A (from the F chord), move up to B (from G), then up to C. A – B – C is a nice, smooth ascending line that concludes at C. This also creates parallel motion with our bass voice during the first two chords, then contrary motion during the last two.
Lastly we’ll add a top voice, or melody line that again chooses one note from each chord.
Top voice (Red): Start on C (from F), move to D (from G), then resolve to E (from C). C – D – E is another smooth ascending line that concludes on a chord tone. The final C triad is approached with neighbor tones as well, and this line creates parallel motion with our middle voice the entire time.
Notice how each voice has its own job and creates interesting motion. This makes it easy for our ear to hear all three voices independently, as opposed to countless other arrangements of this chord progression.
An important caveat: you don’t always have to voice every note in a chord. Many times, the fifth in a chord is expendable, as we hear in this example: the final C chord only contains the notes C and E, with G (the fifth) missing completely. To understand why, simply ask your ear! Try playing the example with the added 5th and ask yourself if it provides any new colors, or richness, to your progression. You’ll probably agree that the presence of the 5th is just “support,” and doesn’t add any important melodic information to the progression.
The Bigger Picture
Voice leading is one of the most well-researched aspects of music theory. There are formal rules about when to double roots versus thirds, when to use inversions, and much more. If you want to master counterpoint, you’ll eventually want to learn those rules.
But here’s the thing: a lot of composing is like engineering – it’s problem-solving. While inspiration is real and important, you can’t turn it on and off like a switch. Having skills like voice leading gives you tools to immediately arrange your chords in new ways, whether inspiration strikes or not.
The goal isn’t to replace creativity with rules, but to expand your toolkit so you can bring more interesting harmonic movement to your music. I wrote The Chord Progression Codex for that reason, to help people write music more easily by understanding music theory.
