How to voice lead a chord progression

this video is sponsored by piano voice leading is when we play a chord progression but rather than playing each chord in its root position I.E with the name of the note at the bottom C with a c at the bottom G with a g at the bottom we instead choose particular inversions particular voicings of the chords in the progression to allow for a very very smooth motion the smoothest possible minimizing the amount of movement we have to make to get to each chord so you can see here I'm playing the same chord progression I did at the start a minor f c g but I'm choosing particular inversions to minimize the amount of notes I have to change as I go from one chord to the next going from a minor to F for example rather than going a minor F I go a minor f because there's only one note different between an A minor chord and an F chord E or F so all I have to do is change that top note to get to the next chord in the chord progression and that not only makes it easier to play but it makes it sound better as well we can think about voice leading in terms of if we were giving the notes of these chords to singers in the choir a singer obviously can't sing all three notes at once a singer can only sing one note at once so we have to give the bottom note of the chord to one singer the next singer plays the next note and the third singer plays that note and if we were keeping the chord progression on voicethread jumping down there it means that singer number one has to go from a to f singer number two has to go from C to a and singer number three has to go from E to C so they're all making that big leap but if we inverted the chords we voiceland the chords to be like this it means that singer number one just stays on a singer number two just stays on C and single number three simply has to move one step up the scale from E to f and we get a motion that not only sounds better but it's easier for everyone involved so let's look at some famous piano chord progressions and have a look at how they've been voiceled and then later in this video we'll look at how you can voice lead any chord progression that you like so we'll start with this one [Music] [Applause] [Music] of course the intro to Clocks by Coldplay now it's played with these arpeggios and arpeggio being when we play a chord but we play each note one after another but the same premise of voice leading applies because it's still a chord progression just arpeggiated so let's take away the arpeggio and we wind up with this chord progression E flat B flat minor B flat minor again F minor and particularly now we've taken the left hand away we can see that these chords are rarely in their root position the only chord in its root position is the last one F minor we see the F at the bottom the E flat chord has been inverted it's actually in first inversion with the g at the bottom B flat minor is in second inversion and as I said the F minor is in its root position if this chord progression was played all in root position it would sound like this [Music] you can see it completely loses the character even though it's the exact same chord progression the fact that it now jumps around so awkwardly kind of ruins it The Voice reading not only made it sound more smooth but it added to the sense of Melody because the notes weren't randomly jumping around the scale they were moving by step as we moved through the different chords now the key thing to bear in mind for voice leading is what notes are in my current chords that are also in the next chord in the progression so clock starts with this E flat major chord the next chord in the progression is B-flat minor now that chord has one note in common with our present chord of E flat and that note is the B flat so that's what we're going to base our inversion around we're going to sort of pivot our hand around that as we voice lead because we're going to keep that exactly where it is so now all we have to do is find a smooth way to get the other two notes of the B flat minor chord into this position we need to find an f and we need to find a d flat well the G that's on the bottom right now could just go down to F which is next door and the E flat at the top can also go down one step to d flat and we found our optimal inversion of B flat minor you don't necessarily even need to know which inversion it is it's a second inversion but that's a sort of nice to know thing all we need to know is we minimized the motion between the two chords now with the last chord in the progression the F minor we can apply the same rule there's one note in common again between B flat minor and F minor our last chord and that is the note F so we're going to keep the F where it is and we're going to think about moving the other two notes so for F minor we need a c and an A flat as well so this note can move down to C and this note can move a flat and we wind up with the chord we need now I think to bear in mind with voice leading whether you're voice leading for the piano or your voice leading acquire is that the lowest voice in your arrangement in my case of the piano it's the left hand that voice doesn't usually get voice-led and that's because if we also adapted the left hand to be the smoothest motion possible we would lose a lot of the character of the chord progression that we're going for even though with clocks it starts with an E flat chord in first inversion if we just look at the right hand the left hand brings it back to a root position by giving us a fat old E flat note and that's true of all the chords in the second chord the right hand is playing a second inversion chord with an F at the bottom but the whole thing has a holistic chord gets brought back as a root chord because of the left hand so bear that in mind that the bass part your lowest voice in your Arrangement will usually not be voiced at it will usually stick to the original root note of each chord now in a moment we'll look at another classic chord progression and how it was inverted at the piano but first of all I'd like to tell you about today's sponsor which is piano pianos is a fantastic online service that guides you through learning how to play the piano they not only have a thousand different songs that you can learn how to play but they have a whole range of different courses and instructional videos on different skills at the piano for example they have a course on chords where they start with Triads and power chords and gradually Advance covering inversions sus chords sevenths and also how to read chord charts and Lead shoots or you could check out their course on gospel piano where step by step they teach you all about the the style and how to play it one of the best things about piano is that your membership gives you access to their sister Services as well including dramio guitario and singio so if you're learning more than one instrument it can be a really great value subscription and if you and your family and friends are learning different instruments you could all share the same subscription to learn more about piano follow the link in the description and do consider subscribing to their YouTube channel let's take a look at another song Back to Black by Amy Winehouse this song is based on the chord progression D minor G minor B flat and a but the chords aren't played like that they're not played in their root positions they are voiceled [Music] foreign [Music] once again the chords are being played with the minimal amount of movement between each chord and that results in this really smooth satisfying progression it starts on D Minor the next chord is G minor now G minor has one note in common with D minor and that is the D so like I said before we're going to keep that where it is that's like our anchor and then the rest of the chord which was this D Minor needs to find its way to an inversion of G minor well if we have to keep our D here we need to then move f up to G and a up to B flat we wind up with G minor like that then the next chord in the progression is B flat now this is an instance where the chord we're on right now G minor actually has two notes in common with the next chord the only note that's different between G minor and B flat IS F G minor has a g B flat has an F so we literally only have to move that Central note to switch between the two now the last chord in this chord progression is an example of when there's no notes in common between the current chord and the next chord and what we have to do in that instance is just find the least distance traveled to get to the next chord so we're currently on B flat and we need to get to the chord A well B flat and a are actually next door to each other in the scale right so we can effectively move the same hand shape one step to the left each note moving one to the left and we wind up with the chord we need [Music] so even even though there was no note to sort of anchor the two together to bond the two together because these two chords are next to each other anyway they're already effectively voice dead for us and then moving from that last chord of the progression a back to where we were at the beginning D Minor well A and D minor have one consistent note together which is a keep that a exactly where it is and we move the other two notes to the notes they need to be on to get to where we started D minor so as you can see voice dating is fairly formalaic to the point that once you've done it quite a lot of the piano you'll start to do it automatically you'll automatically find that next nearest chord the main rule to remember is to look out for the consistent notes between each chord and the progression now when a chord progression is written at the piano it will often have very natural voice leading to it because writing at the piano sort of just lends itself to choosing chords that are physically near to the chord that you're currently on when you write at the guitar because you're often lean back on the open chords you'll wind up writing chord progressions that move around a lot that leap around and each voice in the chord isn't really cohesive to the next and that's a sound within within itself you don't always have to voice lead sometimes there's a certain aesthetic that comes from a non-voicened chord progression but what can be a really valuable skill is as a piano player being able to take a chord progression that perhaps was written on a different instrument like the guitar and then voice lead it into a more cohesive piano part for example a very common chord progression played on guitar is the 12 Bar Blues in the key of C for example that would be C7 and then we'd move to F7 back to C7 then we'd get a G7 and F7 and a C7 now if you just took that from the guitar and placed it on the piano it would sound like what I just played with the root note chords jumping around the piano and it doesn't sound that bad but to get the chord progression to sit well on the piano for it to sound like an actual piano part we want to voice lead these chords so they're not jumping around so randomly for example moving from C7 to F7 rather than going C7 F7 like that we could go from C7 to F7 like that and by doing that we get this far more satisfying movement between the different chords [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 90,258

Keywords: voice leading, chords, piano, progression, voice lead, inversion, how to, music theory, explained

Id: FNl6bb755Z4

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 17 2023