Beginner's Guide to Voicing and Voiceleading || How Nobuo Uematsu Writes a String Part

[Music] i use the terms voicing and voice leading a lot on my channel and i never really take the time to explain what those mean in any depth i want to continue not explaining that so i thought i'd make this video to explain for beginners exactly what i mean by chord voicing and voice leading if you have a little more advanced understanding of music theory i hope you'll still learn something as we use the master nobuo uematsu's track eye to i from final fantasy 9 as an example the track is a simple and quaint arrangement of the game's main theme with the melody given to flute and an accompanying string part playing the chords the more advanced you get with chord extensions and complicated voicing structures it's easy to forget just how beautiful a simple chord progression can sound with the right approach to voicing and voice leading and i was blown away when i transcribed eye to eye because it's a perfect example of this concept both chord voicings and voice leading as terms are rooted in the idea that you should treat every note in a piece of music as if it's an individual voice back in the day if you were writing for an orchestra or a small ensemble or a choir each note in your piece would literally be an individual's sometimes literal voice and this had certain implications on how you wrote music nowadays most of our music is created with guitars and keyboards and composers don't necessarily have to worry about the same restrictions if you're playing guitar and banging out some chords you don't really have to worry about these six individual notes that you're playing or even know what notes they are you just have to remember the shape of each chord as you move from chord to chord same thing to a slightly lesser extent for a keyboard instrument you probably have to know where all the notes are to play chords on a keyboard but you can still think of the shape of each chord while you play without worrying about all of the individual notes however thinking about each note in a piece as an individual voice has implications that can greatly affect the music for the better and it's something that i think all serious musicians and composers should consider these implications fall into two categories vertical and horizontal by vertical implications i mean that if you take a slice out of a piece of music and look at all of the individual notes being played in any given moment you can see how all those notes relate to each other and combine to create the sound of the music in that single moment this is what we mean by a chord voicing the horizontal implications would be this if you take one of those notes and think of it as an individual voice then track how that voice moves across time as you go through the piece you can see a sort of melody line created that could affect the music in a number of ways this is basically what we mean by voice leading so for an example let's say we have a melody and a chord progression and we want to write a string part to accompany this melody by playing this chord progression there are a few things to consider first when writing on a keyboard with synthesized string sounds as uematsu did with eye to eye there's nothing stopping you from voicing the first chord with three notes the second with 18 notes the third with six notes and the fourth with four notes or i guess if you're playing it on a keyboard you only have ten fingers so let's say ten notes for the second chord you could get away with this on a piano and it might sound great but it would sound disjointed and weird for a string section to have players jumping in and out chord by chord to accommodate these voicings it's much better practice to pick a number of voices and stick to that number as if you only had that many string players in your ensemble and this is exactly what uematsu did sticking with four notes per chord throughout the arrangement okay so first let's talk about voicing a chord we know we're starting on a c chord made up of the notes c e and g and we know that we have four voices to use to build this chord so which c e and g notes do we choose from well let's start simple how about this c e g c right in the middle that's what's called a closed voicing because all of the notes in the chord fit inside one octave with no space in between them this certainly is a c chord but string ensembles sound a lot more pretty voicing triads and open voicings meaning the notes are spread out to take up more than an octave with some space in between the chord tones there's a couple of ways we could get there from here we could send the second note from the top up an octave we could send the third note here down an octave that's a nice one but to make things really spread out let's use what's called a drop 2 and 4 voicing this is where you take a basic closed voicing like this count the notes down from the top one two three four then take notes two and four and drop them down an octave now we have this beautiful spread voicing or open voicing that sounds like this compare that to our original closed voicing the open voicing sounds undeniably better when voicing chords you should consider the intervals between the notes as adding their specific colors to the chord in this case we have a perfect fifth up from the bottom note and then two diatonic sixths stacked on top of that the sixth is a beautiful interval and they work really well when you want your chords to sound open and pretty so we have our first voicing now let's move on to talk about voice leading if each of the notes in the c chord were individual players or better yet singers what note could they each move to in the next bar that would create our desired a minor chord when people talk about good voice leading or smooth voice leading they're usually referring to a piece where each voice moves the smallest amount possible to get from chord to chord this isn't always good as we'll discuss later but let's get the basics down first before we move to more complicated musical ideas starting from the top this c note could move to one of a minor's three chord tones it could go down a third to a up a third to e or stay on c going into the next bar if you're looking for the smallest possible movement from chord to chord you can't get much better than not moving at all so let's stick with c for now the next note e can also stay right where it is and become the fifth of our a minor chord so let's do that the g here could either move up a step to a or down a third to e moving up a step is a smaller movement so let's do that now the bass note is a little different because it provides the context for the rest of the harmony so even if it's not technically the smoothest option we're going to want to move down to the root of the chord a this is already extremely smooth voice leading but we can go smoother thinking of each of these notes as being an individual player can open up some possibilities say there was a cello player playing this bass note moving from a whole note c to a whole note a it would be super easy and a little more interesting to fill in this space with a stepwise walk down the scale to get from c to the a this is exactly what uematsu does replacing the leap down of a third with two steps down of a second and there's one other thing he does here that makes this shift even smoother see when we talk about voicing a chord it's not just deciding where each note will go it's also about deciding which notes to include in the chord and which to leave out if we made this chord an a minor 7 chord rather than a straight a minor triad we could take this a note and replace it with a g the flat 7th of the chord this would give the opportunity to have all three of the top voices of the chords stay the same between these two bars leading to what is essentially the smoothest possible voice leading between two identifiably different chords like i said you don't always want to go for maximum smoothness but we'll get to that later first let's practice the super smooth voice leading just a little bit more the next chord f is made up of the notes f a and c starting from the bottom up the bass can once again fill in the space between each root with a walk down the scale the next note up g could either move up a step to the third a or down a step to the root f since both are equally close let's hold off on deciding until we see where the other voices are going to go the next note e can move up by a half step to get to an f which is a very smooth move and the top c can once again stay right where it is which is even smoother now we have two fs and a c in the chord so far so to fill out the chord let's choose our second lowest note to move up to the a to give us this nice open voiced f major triad the next chord e minor is just one step lower than our f here so we could theoretically just drop all of the voices down a step to get to our e minor however this is where we finally get our first glimpse that smoother isn't always better this string parts job isn't just to voice lead between chords its main job is actually to support the melody and the melody in this fourth bar holds this g note for most of the bar to end off the first melodic phrase if we kept our whole note chord pads going that would give us two full beats with no musical movement whatsoever which at this slow of a tempo would be kind of dull uematsu realizes this and fills in the space by taking the top note of the string part and giving it this small counter line figure this presents a small problem without this top note as part of the chord the remaining three notes give us an e a g and another e on top this isn't the end of the world or anything but we could fill out the chord more fully by having the two middle voices move up a step instead to catch the fifth and third of the chord and this is what uematsu does put together these first four bars sound like this let's zoom out a bit and take a look at the next four bars as a whole we have the chords f to c to d minor to g a pretty common chord progression and the e minor chord voicing from the bar before just gets bumped up a step to hit this f chord the exception is the top note counter line which ends on this high e the major seventh of the underlying f chord it's not like this is a crazy move or anything but i think it shows that was prioritizing the top voice making melodic sense with this counterline figure overfitting strictly with the harmony this e has the added bonus of making the transition to the following c chord super smooth with the only note that changes besides the bass of course being this inner a that walks down to a g the smooth voice leading continues as this g walks down to an f the third of the following d minor chord and interestingly enough the other two voices stay right where they are this held c note becomes the flat seventh of the d minor chord making this a d minor seven chord switching back and forth between three note triads and four note seventh chords can feel a little disjointed with either the seventh chords feeling out of place or the triads feeling a little too empty but uematsu's expert voice leading keeps everything feeling like it's exactly the way it should be what's more interesting is this held e note which brings us to the next level of voice leading techniques the suspension nowadays people think of suspended chords as chords with a fourth or second replacing the third but this is a traditional suspension where one note of a chord is held into the next chord to resolve just a little later than it was supposed to this would qualify as a two to one suspension where the third of the previous c chord e is held over to become the second of this d minor chord and then resolves down to the root d on beat three of the bar suspensions like this can really level up your part writing and are a good skill to tackle once you get the basics down of smoothly going from one chord to the next we see another suspension right after this as the top voice walks down to a c then holds that c over the following g7 chord before stepping down to the third b making a classic 4 to 3 suspension over the v chord now this is a sound that you will hear everywhere these suspensions build up momentum going into the next four bar phrase which is the climax of the tune featuring our first out of key notes with this e minor to a to d minor to f minor progression here we start to see uematsu disregard smoothness of voice leading in order to create interesting lines in the strings instead and we start to see a lot more movement in the accompaniment than we saw in the previous eight bars the top line holds over the b note from the previous g7 chord then jumps up to the seventh of our e minor chord d we then step down to the third of our a7 chord then walk up toward a high f to resolve to the third of our following d minor chord except instead of landing on this f we overshoot it to the g above and then float back down two beats later this is called an apogetura or accented dissonance and it's kind of a melodic fake out that can sound absolutely beautiful if done the right way as it is here this top line is almost as active and interesting as the main melody of the tune and it's absolutely gorgeous and it's so obviously prioritizing the interest of the line over fitting perfectly with the chords on any given beat the inner voices support the line too the lower voice dips from a d to a b over this e minor chord mirroring the top line's movement they trade notes so that the chord doesn't lose anything as the top line moves the voice in between them gives us this walk down from g to e the cool thing about this is the use of an f sharp here rather than the f natural you would expect from our c major key the choice to borrow a note from outside the key is noticeable to the listener and just a little bit jarring but if we had walked down from g to f to e that would have created some gross intervals with the other voices a tritone and a minor ninth with the voices below to be exact still it was obviously important to uematsu to have this voice walk down in stepwise motion like this otherwise he would have just held this g over the whole bar uematsu made sure that each of these voices create a line that works independently as a semi-melodic counter line that fits basically within the harmony while simultaneously making sure that when put together the lines complement each other and don't obstruct anything else that's happening not to mention thinking about the context of where we are in the piece starting off with a super smooth approach to voice leading and then gradually getting more and more intricate as the piece builds to a climax you can see just how much a composer has to juggle with even an arrangement as simple as this and to see it executed so perfectly on all fronts is incredibly satisfying let's listen to the whole thing noting the gradual crescendo climax and release of the chord part as the final four bars settle back down to its original simpler smoother voicing structures as the piece draws to a close i hope this video had something to offer you whether you're a beginner just getting a handle on voicing and voice leading or someone more knowledgeable who just likes to see a master like uematsu at work if you want to give this kind of thing a try for yourself i've made some simple worksheets that you can download via link in the description here they have a written out chord progression for you to practice voice leading and some sample answers that i wrote out for you to compare your work to when you're done there's like an infinite number of potential great answers so don't feel like mine are the only correct ones but just so you have something to reference let me know if you like this sort of thing in the comments below it's kind of an experiment to see if that's something worth doing more often anyways you can check out my patreon here if you want to support the channel thank you everyone for watching and i'll see you all in the next one [Music]

Channel: 8-bit Music Theory

Views: 260,303

Keywords: Final Fantasy, Final fantasy 9, Eye to eye, Nobuo Uematsu, How to writ music, Video game music, voice leading, voicings, how to voice chords, music education, how to compose, how to write for strings, string pads, beginner's guide, 8-bit Music Theory

Id: itj-6S1pMQ4

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021