8,720
edits
Changes
m
→Application to Guitar
For guitar, we are more limited than if each voice were played by its own instrument, or has the ability to play any combination of notes simultaneously. For practicality's sake, we may not be able to finger what strict voice leading determines is the proper chord voicing to use.
Here are some charts of complimentary chord shapes that mostly follow good voice leading principles. Leading tones are resolve up to the tonic. Contrary motion is preferred. Movement in parallel 5ths and octaves is avoided. However, we are not retaining strict unique voices - we may choose to add or drop a voice(although we could consider a single note two voices on the same note). Each set of two chords are written in the same position, as large as necessary to accommodate both chords. To actually finger the chords will likely require a positional shift in some occasions. These will work for any position, with the key indicated by where the root note of the tonic chord falls. I am picking a couple examples, but there are actually far more possibilities, especially when we consider 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, and other complex chords.
==== Table Conventions ====
* '''?''' - Indicates that the analysis is questionable due to there being more notes in one chord than the other. We assume that the chord with less notes uses two voices on the same note. Thus For example, if the first chord has less notes than the destination chord, we could say that we can get contrary motion from a the bass note that ascends ascending a M2 '''and''' descends descending a P4 to form a small power chord as the two low bass notes of the next chord.
* '''*''' - Indicates that proper voice leading is '''not''' being followed for the interval in question. This is almost always due to movement to parallel 4ths using similar or parallel motion. We could avoid these bad examples by removing (a) note(s) from one or both chords; however, they are usually too subtle to notice. Where we do allow some undesirable voice leading, we make it as subtle as possible. We avoid it on the top two or bottom two voices. We avoid parallel 5ths and octaves, although we allow parallel 4ths. We prefer similar motion over parallel in many situations.
* A few cases have similar motion of two low notes to the same bass notes. This forms a P1 interval, which should not be led by similar motion; however, the alternative is to use inverted chords, which we are avoiding for clarity at this time.