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Title says it all--is there a definitive guide or book on voice leading for guitar?
For example, if I have a progression as follows:
D | A/C# | Bm | D7/A | G | D | E7 | Asus
I | V6 | vi | V4/3 / IV | IV | I | V7/V | Vsus4
I'm looking for something that will help me work through voice leading different sorts of movements, whether that be with triads, drop chords, all of the above, etc.
I'm not bad at voice-leading basic movements like ii V I's, but once we start to get into secondary dominants, non-traditional harmony, less than usual movements, etc. then I really have to stop and think what're the common tones, which are closest, let's find a new "shape", which notes can I drop if I can't grab all of them with just 4 fingers, etc.
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08-30-2023 10:51 AM
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Bert Ligon has two books that address voice leading. One is specifically for voice leading on ii V I and the other is a collection of studies that has chapters an exercises that go over voice leading. These are both great resources for study and are written in a way that encourages going a mile deep into one concept.
Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony
Comprehensive Techniques for the Jazz Musician
Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony (Sheet Music) Jazz Book (841077) by Hal Leonard
Comprehensive Technique for Jazz Musicians – 2nd Edition - For All Instruments (Sheet Music) Jazz Book (30455) by Hal Leonard
403 Forbidden
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The Mick Goodrick voiceleading stuff is kind of exhaustive. Not the easiest thing in the world to use but super cool. There’s a guy on here who keeps them archived on a site.
Originally Posted by JazzMuzak
Resources for Jazz Guitar and More - Modern Guitar Harmony
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I'm surprised that this is useful. Upon cursory examination it seems to be every possible way of playing a chord connecting to every possible way of playing the next chord. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
It seems to me, and maybe I need to be enlightened, that there's an easier way.
1. Learn the notes in the chords you use. Instantly, no thinking allowed.
2. Know the fingerboard - cold. No thinking.
#1 and #2 above are a lot of work, but it's very useful knowledge. Best way to gain it is to learn to read, all over the neck. A few months work.
3. Now, pick a song and pick a fingering for the first chord. Three, maybe four, notes. Lots of options.
4. Now there are a couple of choices. A good one is to make up a little countermelody that you're going to put in the soprano voice of each chord. That gives you the highest of the three or maybe four notes you need.
5. Voice leading usually involves minimal movement. So for each note in chord 1 what are the reachable notes in chord 2? A couple of options at most - recalling that your countermelody specifies the highest note.
You're left with no more than a handful of options for chords 1 and 2 that are playable and sound good to you.
6. Rinse and repeat (e.g. start with a different chord or voicing) until you've gotten some chord sequences that sound good and are playable (you're going to want to use these in different tempos and keys, so playability is important). Write them down or remember them.
7. Seems to me you've just learned some voice leading that you can apply to any song with the same changes. And, you didn't have to think about drop-n (unless you found the first chord thinking that way), interval vs functional or anything like that.
8. For maximum utility, it's probably a good idea to focus on very common sequences like iim V7 I; I VI7 iim V7; I I7 IV ivm I; I III7 VI7 II7 V7 I. They occur in a lot of tunes, so figuring out some good chord sequences is probably a very efficient use of one's time.
9. To summarize: pick a starting chord and then play subsequent chords by moving each note as little as possible. Even better, put a simple countermelody in the soprano voice of your chords.
10. My favorite player at this: Ralph Sharon -- Tony Bennett's long term accompaniest.
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Yeah it’s a different strokes thing for sure. And that’s exactly what it is. Kind of as close to exhaustive as it could be. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Useful? Again —not sure.
Cool? Sure. If you’re a huge dork. Which I am.
But yeah, I use cycles like this for practicing but not sure of the utility beyond that. Which is probably my own shortcoming.
For what it’s worth, Mick is pretty transparent in the book about this. It’s more of an experiment for him. There’s literally a section in the back of the last volume called Dark Night of the Chord where he’s like … was this even worth it?
He doesn’t say it wasn’t … so there’s that.
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It's an approach that many will not find at all useful. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Every page can be seen as an etude in ear training, fingerboard visualization, voice awareness, harmonic movement in 3 or 4 voices and motific movement. These things are not useful for many, but others find it revolutionary in the sensibilities it changes.
I've worked extensively with Goodrick's books, as well as Fux and Shechter, Adler's orchestration and I think they all give very thorough foundations. Still the best work on counterpoint and voice leading for me has been Bach chorales, listening to, singing one voice at a time, playing through in 4 voices on guitar and learning to feel through immersion.
The Goodrick books, as I said, have the strong component of ear training and fingerboard sense to them because they're canonic exercises that cover all inversions of a chord voicing and open up one's ear to an intuitive vocabulary of voice movement. Ben Monder, Julian Lage, Lage Lund, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Tim Miller have all been fundamentally imprinted with the results from this study of this work.
None of these guys could have told you how or in what ways they would be changed, but all of them looked at the pages within as etudes, worked with them and found an unexpected relationship with their instruments through it.
No matter which source provides guidelines for your study, once you see the principles put forth in a convincing way, it's going to be a lot of time on the instrument getting to expand your awareness into control of multiple voices. In the end, you teach yourself. You put in the time and the patience will pay off.
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It’s not a book, but I would suggest taking everything down into two voices, work out what you are doing with that top voice, and then pop in a middle voice (or two if you are hardcore) to taste. I prefer to work in three voices much of the time because it gives you more flexibility, so for seventh chords etc you are having to drop a voice - this is all absolutely fine if you have strong voice movement (counterpoint) Originally Posted by JazzMuzak
So for your example, which has a pleasing mix of stepwise and leap bass movement, what’s the melody/lead line here? We could for instance go in strict diatonic parallel
F# E D C B F# G# D
or oblique
F# G F# F# G F# G# A
or more contrary - much less familiar to the guitar
F# G A A B D D
Some of this will be familiar. So the first example is in parallel tenths with the bass. A lot of guitar grips are in tenths - root, 1st and 2nd inversion drop 2’s, root and 1st inversion spread triads. This is why they sound good when we move them up and down the neck, esp if we change inversion. Wes Montgomery. But this sort of movement can get a bit predictable on its own.
what I call staggered motion - where the voices don’t all move together at the same time (I don’t think I’m the only one?) is a more sophisticated version of this. Baroque suspension chains and much of book I of the Mick Goodrick Voice Leading Almanac are contrapuntally variants on staggered motion.
In more modern harmony you might opt for a parallel interval not used in trad harmony. Sevenths and ninths are common for example. This is also a good way to make more traditional chords sound more modern.
Oblique motion is also quite natural to the guitar, but to do it for a whole progression is something I think is less obvious to us
Contrary is generally the one that is least natural, and as the bass and a melody move apart you will move from very close chords (perhaps even an interval) to widely spaced harmonies. It’s very good practice.
The thing with a lot of fretboard harmony books is that they train you on grips but the melody, bass and middle voices are emergent from the chords. This is harmony —> voiceleading.
to me the term ‘voice leading’ suggests you are still thinking about chords as the foundation. Connecting and moving through chords.
what I am learning is how to make the chords emergent from the combination of melody and bass. This is counterpoint —> harmony
I think both angles naturally converge on the same place. It’s nice to move between both. At the end of the day, we jazzers need to read chord symbols.
Your example is very classical/functional but these general principles are also taught in jazz - usually more chromatically.
Practicing a standards chord progression with an ascending diatonic or chromatic scale in the top voice is a pretty common exercise and will help bust you out of stock grips and that thing when you play everything in parallel guitar grips drifting down towards the nut. in this case we don’t normally insist on bass contrary motion, but that’s a good variant of the chord exercise.
As guitarists we tend to think chords/shapes, but chords are just frozen slices of real harmony. As jazzers we have to learn to make chord charts into real harmony, but the counterpoint approach is really great for getting away from grips. It’s also a good way to get out of stolid schoolbook functional harmony thinking (functions can be useful but not every chord has a clear function.)
’harmony is a fairy story told about counterpoint’
‘Voice leading’ = melted chords
Chords = frozen counterpoint
oh and all of this is a million times easier on a piano, which can help you find your way.Last edited by Christian Miller; 08-31-2023 at 04:27 AM.
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I haven't found theoretical frameworks for generating voice leading to be helpful. Could be my weakness.
I'm probably missing something, but it seems akin to trying to apply the concept of "modal interchange". There are a great many possible interchanges at any given moment, but a lot of them don't sound good.
So, it seems to me, you're still going to have to catalog the substitutions that sound good and you're not going to be able to internalize an infinite number. So, might as well start with a song and figure out some nice sounding harmony. OTOH, I'm aware that some great players talk about the benefits, but are they predictive or post-hoc?
Theoretical concepts resulting in, for example, hundreds of pages of letters and arrows pertaining to voice leading ...really? That would be better than spending the same amount of time figuring out how Ralph Sharon comps?
Of course, the usual caveat applies. There are many paths up the mountain and no two players bring identical skills and baggage. I'm aware that something that makes no sense to me may be golden to somebody else. I'm also aware that sometimes you just don't know what you don't know.
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Is it either or? Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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Is Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony going to help me get out of chonking 2 chords a bar through rhythm changes? I'm just stuck in a rut and that Peter Bernstein video is over my head, or something.... when I try what he talks about well... it sounds be better if I comped Bb to Bb7 for 16 bars then did the bridge and went back to my Bb Bb7 vamp.
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you can take the boy out of New York… Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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yeah, I think if your main aim is to be a functional jazz guitarist playing basic but effective comps… well some of the best players do just that. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
I think if you want to dive into harmony and find a more personal route then it can seem overwhelming. There’s some really good approaches out there. It might be a leap of faith to try any of them. It may not be immediately clear what any of this stuff is actually for. It may make your head hurt.
if it makes it easier, the more you work on fretboard harmony, the easier it gets.
I remember the first time I was introduced to the voice leading almanacs in a lesson I found the first cycle alone almost impossible to work on. It takes time and consistent work.
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Yeah, so 22 year old me would’ve said YOU MUST DO EVERYTHING and then collapsed in on himself like a neutron star of stress and pressure. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
25 year old me would’ve said it would be more important to explore all those arrows and stuff.
30 something me says the simple foundation, perhaps informed by your favorite player, would be the most important thing, but that bringing new stuff to it is half the fun.
Ive been digging in on Ed Bickert lately and working on those third and seventh voicings. Trying to work on sort of riff rhythms. But there are also things I’ve been getting into like passing chords and upper structures that aren’t necessarily in the source material. So i don’t see much reason to sacrifice one for the benefit of the other.
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I also think the voiceleading stuff is particularly helpful with the triads, and particularly because of the way guitarists have to play. Rather than playing big extended chords, we tend to play a constellation of little chords that give the vibe of Big Chord. So being able to move smoothly between C and Em or C and G is important less because we make those chord changes a lot, but because C major 9 kind of sucks to play most of the time.
Apropos of nothing.
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What do you mean? Bb and Bb7? Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Bb
I've got
Bb7
Rhythm
Bb
I've got
Bb7
music
Edit: I'm so far in the weeds and off topic. I don't think I can even explain how I'm using this to try and comp through the song... I'm not sure if I need to pivot my approach again, go back to what I was doing before or keep exploring this path.
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I think it would probably be Bb to F7, no? Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Internalizing a number of usable avenues is a realistic, practical and musical goal. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
If you're goal is not to establish mastery of multiple voices on the fly, to create 3 or 4 independent voices that conspire to create harmony along the way, to have a degree of voice independence that you'd consider impossible, if a larger degree of internal voice leading is not of interest is not your goal, than yeah, of course a deep dive into any method aimed at that will be opaque in its utility.
That doesn't mean that someone committed to study of ear training and fingerboard study in a methodical way isn't going to achieve that very thing.
It starts with attitude. If somebody doesn't see how knowing scales is going to result in angular melody, then it's not going to happen.
To each their own. You can always try on somebody else's shoes, even a weirdly shaped and totally unintuitive set of snow shoes, and walk around in them enough to find your way in them, before you decide there's nothing to it.
Sometimes taking the time to know that which you have never tried can change your idea of what it's really about, and what it can bring to your world.
Sometimes it's good enough just to say what works for you is all you need to know.
Yeah, I can give you respect for that too.
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I was trying to simplify it as much as I could. The dominant 7 of Bb was going to make the chord function as F7. I don't know... Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Ah yeah. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
Dominant 7 refers to a chord type and not a scale degree. So a Bb7 doesn’t have a dominant 7, it is a dominant 7.
The classical theory name would be a Major-minor seventh chord because it is a major triad with a minor seventh added. We call it “dominant” because it traditionally occurs with and resolves to the chord a fifth below it. “Dominant” is the obnoxious theory name for the fifth scale degree in a key, and is used for other chords which perform the same function.
This kind of comes back to the voiceleading actually. The F7 pulls so nicely because the 3rd is A, which pulls hard up to Bb (or is a common tone to the maj7 or whatever) and the b7 is Eb which pulls hard down to D.
So a Bb7 performs the same function but those same chord tones … D and Ab in this case … would resolve to Eb and G respectively. In other words, to an Eb chord. So the Bb7 isn’t a replacement for F7.
All this comes from knowing some diatonic harmony. Why certain sets of chords belong together and what function they perform when they show up together.Last edited by pamosmusic; 08-31-2023 at 09:34 PM.
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Wow looks like this sparked a lot of good conversation. Originally Posted by TheGrandWazoo
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like these books are for melodic voice leading, not chordal voice leading, no? Obviously significant overlap, but some distinct differences as well..
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I dunno, I hear resolution going from Bb7 to Bb. I might not have all the vocabulary right, but I hear resolution. I’ll probably just memorize 3 or 4 sets of changes and move on from this. Just so I have something to play. We don’t even do a RC tune tonight. Originally Posted by pamosmusic
So much to learn, probably best not to get hung up mastering one form.
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I mean … if you were going to get hung up one form, rhythm changes wouldn’t be a bad choice. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
And resolution is half the equation … it’s the tension that’s missing.
Practically speaking, “dominant” is another word for tension. That’s what the F7 does for you.
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