Finding Good Voicings

5 minute read

To give some context: voicing is, given a chord name and quality, choosing the notes to play to represent the chord. The key to picking a good voicing is context: context of the chords that were played around the current chord. To figure out what voicing to use in a given context, you need to be aware of the different characteristics of sound that you can control with voicings.

• Voice Leading
• Consonance and Dissonance
• Texture
• Final Note

Voice Leading

Voice leading is minimizing the movement (the distance between the notes) between chords. This way the chords lead into one another and create coherent phrases (not only think of your right hand as creating phrases with the melody, but also think of your left hand as creating phrases with chord movement). To see what I mean, play this example from “My Foolish Heart” with bad voice leading:

And then play this example that also uses block chords, but practices good voice leading:

This isn’t to say that all your chords need to voice lead into each other. As always, it’s about context (this will be the theme of this article). If you want to start a new phrase, then you can ignore voice leading.

Consonance and Dissonance

Consonance and dissonance can be controlled through which notes you choose to use in your voicings. You should have the shell chords (3 and 7) in your voicings, but the rest are up to you and they can add a level of consonance or dissonance depending on which note you decide to add. You can check out common alterations for a deeper dive into which notes add to your chord.

A good general approach to this: adding the 1 or 5 will sound more consonant, and if you add extensions, the extensions that are a half-step away from a chord tone (1, 3, 5, or 7) are more dissonant than the ones that are a whole-step away. Adding more dissonant extensions will make the chord more dissonant as well.

Play through this version of “My Foolish Heart” above and notice how voicings with more extensions sound more dissonant, and notice how we’re varying the level of dissonance throughout the piece to keep it interesting. It’s a constant push and pull of tension and release. Sounds a lot more interesting than the block chord version!

A good rule of thumb is to not double notes besides the 1 or 5.

Texture

Let’s think about peanut butter. There are two different textures of peanut butter available: chunky and smooth. Chunky peanut butter has intermittent little, crunchy pockets of nuts which give a more of a bite and a surprise factor to the peanut butter. Creamy peanut butter has a homogenous, consistently smooth texture; each bite you know what you’re going to get.

Now play these four different voicings of the same chord:

All four of these voicings have the same notes; all we’re changing is the locations of these notes, but all they sound different. Do you hear the different textures that result from them? The first voicing is like creamy peanut butter, the second voicing is like chunky peanut butter, the third voicing is like peanut butter brittle, and the fourth voicing is like watery peanut butter.

Different intervals within the voicing affect the texture of the chord, and texture is something you should be factoring in when thinking about the context of the chord as well. I generally think about them in three different categories. Intervals of a second are more dissonant, intervals of a third are more consonant, and intervals of a fourth give a floaty quality. Intervals of greater than a fourth also give more space to the voicing, but not all of them have the same floaty quality as the fourth. Try playing a three note voicing built with fourths, then fifths, then sixths. Notice how only the voicing built with fourths has that particular floaty quality.

It might be confusing that I’m referring to these as consonant and dissonant like the previous section, but I think on top of note selection, texture is also a contributer to consonance and dissonance.

Play this version of “My Foolish Heart” and notice the changes in textures and how they also contribute to the ebb and flow of tension and release.

Something unrelated to intervals that affect the texture of the chord is whether it is rootless or not. Rootless chords have more of a floaty quality to them even if they are constructed in thirds.

Play this version of “My Foolish Heart” with rooted block chords:

And then play this version that switches between rooted and rootless voicings:

Notice how the rootless voicings sound less grounded. Try playing them without the 5th degree and you’ll find that they sound even less grounded.

Final Note

This article is more about the characteristics of a “good voicing,” but remember that a “good voicing” is left up to your discretion, and there isn’t one correct voicing for each context. A good voicing is a voicing where you have considered all these characteristics above in context. This may leave you thinking that there are so many factors to think about creating a good voicing, that how can you possibly come up with one on the spot when comping? For this, refer to my other articles on voicing such as Finding Two-Handed Voicings Based on the Melody Note and Left Hand 3-Note Voicings. These articles help you create a system to find voicings faster.

Written on June 6th, 2020 by Chris Cheung