easy guide to songwriting

Take your lead from the orchestral world and add smoothness and complexity to your songwriting

Defined as ‘the linear progression of individual melodic lines, voices or parts and their interaction with one another to create harmonies’, voice leading is a music theory technique rooted in choral and orchestral arrangements. In a nutshell, it involves breaking chordal parts down into individual voices, then making each voice flow from chord to chord in a logical way. In, say, a string quartet, each player has their own part that, blended, make a continuously evolving harmony. Voice leading needn’t be limited to backing vocals and string arrangements though – it can also make a big difference when making piano-based chord progressions and pad parts sound smoother.

Being largely keyboard or guitar-based, a lot of modern pop songs don’t have to worry about how the individual notes in the chords they’re playing are moving. Using a MIDI keyboard to play synthesised strings, for example, it’d be easy to play the first chord with three notes, the second with four, the third with six and the fourth with three. However a real string section would need players jumping in and out from chord to chord to accommodate those extra voices, which would sound uneven.