Smooth Voice Leading

Goal
Apply smooth voice leading to a chord progression.

Vocabulary
•    smooth voice leading = using inversions to minimize movement between chords

Essential Knowledge
•    The most useful application of chord inversions is smooth voice leading.
•    Smooth voice leading ensures that notes in common between consecutive chords don’t move, while notes that are not in common move as little as possible.

Tips
•    Using only root position chords tends to sound jumpy.
•    Using common notes to anchor transitions between chords, we are much less likely to play a wrong note or lose our place in the music. 

Fun Fact
•    The term “smooth voice leading” comes from vocal music, where composers strive to create smoothly flowing melodies for each singer rather than having them jump around, which is harder to sing and more jarring to the ear. 

PLAY THIS
Create a chord progression of 4 triads, and use the following strategy to apply smooth voice leading to each pair of consecutive chords:
1.    Play the first chord in the LH in root position.
2.    In the RH, play the chord in root position that you want to smoothly move to. 
3.    Find common notes between the two chords, and remove these notes from the RH. (if there are no common notes, skip this step)
4.    Move the non-common notes in LH to the remaining notes in the RH, using the minimum amount of movement possible.
5.    Repeat the previous steps again, but play the first chord in first inversion. Then repeat the previous steps one more time, but play the first chord in second inversion.