How “Voice Leading” Can Revolutionise Your Piano Playing!
1. Who, Where and What Is “Voice Leading”? 🤔
Voice leading - “The practice of smoothly transitioning from one chord to another using a minimum amount of movement in the process.”
Imagine a choir...in a typical choir there are usually four voice groups; soprano, alto, tenor and bass. The sopranos are the really high women, the altos are the lower women, the tenors are the higher men and the basses are the lowest men. Each of these voices are responsible for singing different melodies, and together these melodies form chords!
But it would be very odd if each of those melodies were jumping up and down to get to the notes that work, singing a high note for one chord and then jumping down to a low note for the next chord and then back up high for the following chord. Not only would that make it difficult for a singer to sing, but it would also sound quite unnatural to listen to, because its hard for a listener to latch onto lots of jumping around! This is why we have “Voice Leading”.
If we were writing a piece of music for a choir, we would want each of the vocal parts to have their notes move as little as possible, either not moving the note at all or moving just by a step, so that each part isn’t jumping around. It is also best to try and do this on the piano, in much the same way!
2. Which Notes Do I Play?! 🎹
In music there are 12 unique notes before they start repeating (on a piano that’s 5 black notes and 7 white notes). A scale uses just 7 out of the 12 notes and all songs use a scale to narrow down the notes the song is going to use. The easiest example of this is the scale of C major because on a piano, the 7 notes happen to be all of the white notes.
C MAJOR SCALE NOTES
C D E F G A B
Using this scale we can form a type of chord called a “triad” starting on each of the 7 notes, and we do this by playing every other note starting on each note in the scale.
C MAJOR SCALE TRIADS
C triad (C E G)
D triad (D F A)
E triad (E G B)
F triad (F A C)
G triad (G B D)
A triad (A C E)
B triad (B D F)
These triads form the basis of pretty much every song you can think of! If you happen to look up the chords for a song, you are working a song out by ear, or you have the sheet music, these triads will make up the foundations of what you play!
3. Inverting Bad Voice Leading! 🙃
However, if we have a song that is using the scale of C major for example and it uses the C triad, F triad, A triad and the G triad, we are going to have to jump our hand around to play the notes from the chord, and as we now know, that is bad voice leading and we can make it sound better!
So how do we fix it?
Well we can use something called “Inversions” to rearrange the notes in the chord! Let’s take the C triad as an example, the notes in a C triad are C, E and G. If we play these notes on the piano this is called a “root position triad” because the root of the chord (the name of the chord) is at the bottom.
If we move that C note to the top instead, we now get E, G and C. Now we have a 1st Inversion C triad.
If we do that again and move the note E to the top, we get G, C and E, which is a 2nd inversion C triad.
These are the three inversions of a triad, and we can use these to give the chords the best possible voice leading!
4. Let’s Get Practical! 💪
So how do we use these inversions to transform our playing and give us the best voice leading! Well, here’s an example with the song Yellow by Coldplay! This song uses the scale of B major.
(# = “sharp“ - this just means 1 key up, so a C# is the black key, one key up from a C)
B MAJOR SCALE NOTES
B C# D# E F# G# A#
B MAJOR SCALE TRIADS
B triad (B D# F#)
C# triad (C# E G#)
D# triad (D# F# A#)
E triad (E G# B)
F# triad (F# A# C#)
G# triad (G# B D#)
A# triad (A# C# E)
The triads in the verse for this song are a B triad (B D# F#), an F# triad (F# A# C#), an E triad (E G# B) and then back to a B triad (B D# F#).
We could play this by playing these chords in the right hand and playing the root note (the note of the chord name) in the left hand!
Left Hand: B
Right Hand: B D# F#
Left Hand: F#
Right Hand: F# A# C#
Left Hand: E
Right Hand: E G# B
Left Hand: B
Right Hand: B D# F#
But this would involve a little bit of jumping around and we could definitely make it sound nicer to listen to by using good voice leading. So instead we could try and only move each chord by step and do something like this:
Left Hand: B
Right Hand: B D# F#
Left Hand: F#
Right Hand: A# C# F# (instead of F# A# C#)
Left Hand: E
Right Hand: G# B E (instead of E G# B)
Left Hand: B
Right Hand: F# B D# (instead of B D# F#)
Now we have rearranged each of the chords so that each note is only moving by a step at a time! You can play these chords along to the song or sing with them. Try it out and see how it can make your playing sound much better and more pianistic!
Matthew Cawood
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