Serendipity : Manouche : left hand : Voicings

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Voicings

Voicings are series of chords in which underlying melodies can be heard. They are not specific to Manouche in any way but since they are used, I chose to talk about them a little. A know voicing example is the theme for Cherokee (midi file). Just like improvisation, there are zillions of ways to do voicings. In guitar, most voicings are played on three or four notes that go along the harmony of the tune. There are also widely used to vary the accompaniment, especially while other instruments are improvising (therefore with a low volume and often in the high pitch to leave leeway to the instrument playing the bass notes), but also in guitar choruses richer than those played with single notes. This aspect of improvisation is probably one of the most complex to begin with since several simultaneous improvisation notes must be thought of, or rather one note for the melody and several notes for the underlying chord, often with inversions. However, just like anything else, there are tricks that make the whole thing easier. As usual, if you do your homework steadily, a voicing chorus will be played with less tension: you have to know a few typical chords sequences and integrating other people's voicing choruses prove vey helpful too. The important step before "feeling" that a chord will sound good on the melody is to start associating the chord sound to its visual shape on the neck. Well, at least it is the way I work now. The goal is that one should mentally hear the sound of the chord before fretting it. This learning curve is quite steep but in the end, I believe it can become more or less natural. For the time being, I'm not there yet so when I'm running short of ideas, I just dig in my toolcase: chord scales, shamelessly stolen voicings, elaborations on a chord (as Angelo Debarre would put it), ...

It should be pinpointed that often, it's the highest note of the voicing that sings the melody. Well not always...

Voicings starting from a chord

As always, we should start with simple things and gradually raise the difficulty: let's start with voicings around a known chord. This stems from my personal experience, before thinking about voicings, I wanted to play richer comping. And the first hurdle I came across was to find other ways of playing the same chord to leave the same old left hand positions. The hardest part of it was to forget about the root notes. Once I left the root notes and got into inversions, I discovered a wonderworld of chords. Another part of the solution was to find chord sequences that started from typical chords. Even though there are more than 20 chords fingering (far more actually) on the four top strings (see site Jazz-Primer), and the same for the four central strings, at first, it's just wiser to stick to four or five chord types that we will get slowly accustomed to and be able to hear mentally just by knowing the shape. It's actually more important in my opinion to hear those chords internally than to know their names. The rationale is simple: in the voicings world, inversions rule and each chord shape can be reused in a wealth of different harmonic contexts.

To get back to voicings starting from typical chords, it should be said that certain chords can be easily substituted to others: 6/9 chords can generally replace M7 chords for instance. 7 can also be replaced by 9 if the melody allows it.

Here's a F#7M.

You can notice on the previous chart that 6/9 chords with root on the lower E string and on the A string have the same fingering on the four top strings. Good news: here's your first easy inversion one 4th highest with a simple hand shift. For the rest, we almost have a scale with equivalent chords:

Are you with me ? These are just a few basics to try voicings with chord types.

A few chords that I often use in voicings

The main 20-ish chord fingerings I use for now on the four highest strings are the following (most of the times, I'm able to recognie them by hearing them, well maybe not all the time). There are many more with their own sound but each one should experiment (nothing replaces personal work). I purposedly omitted to name those chords since the objective of the work here is to be able to hear them before actually plucking them.

Exercise to get familiar with voicing sounds

A way that I find efficient to mentally anticipate the rendering of a voicing, is to start from a four-note chord and randomly change one note at a time just to hear how it sounds. This is litterally chordal morphing. To be done at home of course as an ear training exercise.

Later, you can do the same exercise but changing two notes at a time.

From time to time, a random sequence will sound so good that you will want to memorize it to use it in comping.

A few voicings in chords which notes are all within an octave

This kind of chords is often used on a keyboard but much less on a guitar. The reason is quite simple : they are hard to play because of the wide extension of the left hand's fingers they require. Nonetheless, it is as usual: with some work, these positions become a little more natural. On each position, the root is depicted in red.

Progression over a chord change in A7M:

An interesting progression:

Voicings on inversions

This is the kind of voicings that you can do when you don't want to take too many risks: play a melody on top of chord inversions mixed with diminished chords. To benefit from this technique, the only necessary thing is that the chord lasts long enough to play different inversions. Of course, you will have to learn all inversions (that's 8 of a kind if they are played on 4 contiguous strings on the high and central strings).

Let's start with Gm6, its 8 inversions are the following. Four on the high strings:

And four on the central strings:

Now let's introduce the diminished chords, we get the two following charts:

And on the four central strings:

Just with these schemas, it will be possible to improvise melodies on the highest E string without ever being out of tune.

If you get the principle, you can also try on many other kinds of 4-note chords such as 7, m7, 7M, m6, m7M and half-diminished. Do not forget that Gm6 and Em7/5b (half-dimnished E) are equivalent since they're made of the same notes, and in the world of voicings, that inversion sounds good.

Voicings on scales

That kind of approach is another way to envisage voicings. Here are a few examples that I use more or less regularly for voicings.

Diatonic scale with root notes on the four middle strings (here in Bb):

Diatonic scale with root notes on the four highest strings (here in Eb):

Another way to play the diatonic scale on the four highest strings (in CM7 here):

The two same chords Dm and Em can be played in various positions on the neck which creates a a three-note chords scale (based on the CAGED system), on the three highest strings:

Diminished scale (the easiest voicing in the world) on the four central strings and on the four highest strings. The fingering does not change:

Whole tone - half tone scale on the four highest strings:

Melodic minor scale on the four highest strings (in Em7 here):

This can be done on any kind of scales.