The Art of Voice Leading

AT THE BEGINNING of every guitarist’s musical journey, you learn a set of open “cowboy” chords and barre chords — a few major, minor and 7th shapes that set you on your way to playing every song in an “easy guitar” songbook. But where do you go after you’ve exhausted all the possibilities of these stock shapes, and how do you expand on the textures of common progressions to make them sound more interesting? One sure-fire way to do this is to incorporate voice leading into your playing.

Voice leading is a musical concept that dates back to the Baroque era of classical music. It involves treating chords not as block shapes that move indifferently from one to another but as groups of individual, single-note “voices” that weave melodically through a progression. This usually means moving each voice as little as possible from chord to chord through the use of — chord shapes that employ a note other than the root as the lowest note — and chord extensions — nonchord tones added atop a triad or 7th chord. Traditionally, the rules of voice leading, established by Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries, were strict and uncompromising. For example, parallel 4ths, 5ths and octaves were not allowed, a prohibition that would make so much great modern music “illegal,” and voices — which were likened to the bass, tenor, alto and soprano parts in a choir — could not be crossed