How to Use Chord Voicings Effectively

Part 1
scorecastonline.com by Robin Hoffmann June 18, 2012

There are nearly endless possibilities of how to make the same chord sound, and
while some of them sound quite disastrous others have a stellar resonance and
are reason for scrolling back in an audio file to listen once again. There seem to
be endless parameters that define a chord sound, and often people end up in
working their way to their desired sound by trial and error.
This tutorial series tries to shed some light on the reasons that make a difference
in a chord voicing and why.
But first of all: what is the difference between a chord and a voicing? While the
term chord only defines which notes sound together, a voicing specifies exactly
HOW they sound together. A voicing is the specific structure of how the notes of
the chord are spread out over the register.
To understand how voicings work it is necessary to have a basic knowledge of
acoustics. Due to the fact that there are several frequencies sounding together at
the same time, we need to understand how they behave together.
A major principle that defines not only voicings but big parts of the music we
hear is consonance and dissonance.
Basically, if we hear two notes together they have a specific oscillation ratio. For
example if note a swings exactly twice as often as note b, note a is exactly one
octave higher than note b. The ratio in this case is 2:1. The simpler this ratio, the
more consonant the resulting sound that were hearing when both notes are
playing together. For our perception that means that they sound relaxed and
stable without (much) tendency to resolve.

Below you see the ratio of a perfect fifth. While the first frequency does two
complete oscillations, the second one does three in the same time which means a
ratio of 2:3. (Actually, the perfect fifth and most other intervals of our tempered
tuning have slight differences to that but for the matter of simplicity, well stick
to their natural ratios.)

The more complex that ratio gets, the more dissonant it sounds to our ear.
Generally we feel the urge of the notes wanting to resolve to a more consonant
sound.
Understanding this basic principle helps a lot to actually understand how
voicings work. Of course, the more notes your chord consist of the more complex
the relation between all the notes becomes, and eventually it will become too
complex to actually consider all interval relations. This is the reason why many
people go to the mode of Ill just try what sounds best.
But the concept of consonance and dissonance is part of every voicing, and
having this under control helps tremendously to make good sounding voicings.
The following is a very simple example of how big the influence of that principle
on any chord voicing is:
A major seventh has a very strong dissonance (the ratio is 15:8) which can clearly
be heard by the impression to our ear that it has a strong tendency to resolve
outwards to the octave.

If we now fill up this interval with two more notes to end up with a maj7 chord,
we notice that the strong dissonance of the major seventh seems to be quite a bit
reduced.

In fact, in standard jazz theory, this chord actually can sustain as a tonic chord
and be treated as a chord that has no tendency to resolve.
But how is it possible that the formerly very strong dissonance of the major
seventh got subjectively reduced? The explanation for this can be found in the
inner structure of the chord. We learned above, that a perfect fifth is a very
consonant interval creating a lot of acoustic stability. If we now have a more
thorough look at our maj7 chord we can actually find two perfect fifths in this
voicing.

The influence of these two perfect fifths stabilize the whole chord structure in a
way that the dissonance of the major seventh gets pushed more to the
background of our perception. Also, the thirds that we can see in this chord
voicing have quite a strong consonance and therefore add to the more stable
sounding structure.
Lets just have a look at a different voicing of this very same maj7 chord to get an
understanding of how different voicings can alter the sound of the very same
chord:

If we now look at the interval structure, we get quite a few differences:

We still have the basic triad of C, E and G so basically one perfect fifth and
two thirds remain the same.

However, we lose the major 7th and have a minor 2nd now, both intervals
have more or less the same degree of dissonance (as they are
complimentary intervals) with a tendency of the major 7th sounding more
dissonant as the two rubbing frequencies are more exposed due to the

distance between them while on the major 2nd they feel more like a
frequency cluster being more tricky to hear through by our ear.

Were also losing one of the perfect fifths from before and now have a
perfect 4th instead. The perfect fourth has a slightly stronger dissonance
(ratio of 3:4) compared to the perfect fifth (2:3) but is still considered as a
consonant interval.

The framing interval now becomes a minor 6th which has a comparable
dissonance to a third

Just by inverting the chord, we got a slightly different sounding voicing

regarding the dissonance.
The perfect fourth has a slightly more dissonant sound than the perfect fifth that
we had in the root position. The minor second is almost as dissonant as the
major seventh it used to be so the overall impression might be a slightly more
dissonant and less stable sound than the root position.
Of course the differences here can be argued, as they are not really significant
and are probably also down to taste and listening experience. But the more
complex the chords we work with get, the more drastic differences can be found
between different chord voicings.
The next part of this series will deal with more complex chords, discussing the
influence of so called tension notes on different types of chords.
Born in a musical family, Robin Hoffmann grew up surrounded by music.
Besides scoring several feature films and orchestrating major game titles such
asAnno 1404, Black Prophecy and Halo Legends, Robin has written a number of
concert compostions including a Violin Concerto which has been recorded with

the LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at Abbey Road Studios. He cocomposed the multiple award-winning musical Dllebach Kari and has worked
on music for several international artists such as Sarah Chang, Russell Watson,
The Lovebugs, and Seven. He is also teaching several students in
composition/orchestration as well as tutoring the renowned online course
programmes by ThinkspaceOnline.