Voice leading and melody-driven parts

denz32

Hi everyone, 
I’ve recently been thinking about voice leading to create more melody-driven parts. Some of my favourite tunes have all kinds of crazy chords that don’t fit/stick within a given key; this has left me scratching my head.

I did what many now do in 2026 and asked ChatGPT “how do bands such as X, write progressions such as Y” and it suggested that these parts may have been created using voice leading techniques.

I watched this YouTube video yesterday and thought it might be an interesting step in figuring out some of this stuff . The premise is to figure out a melody that you like and then harmonise chords around that melody.

I’ve followed along with the tutorial and thought I could apply this concept to my own melody. So I’ve noodled around, found something that sounds alright (not exactly setting the world alight but a simple melody that I can start off with). Then I’ve essentially used triads to guess/noodle around until I find something that fits.

I’ve recorded a quick video on my phone (here it is) to demonstrate the melodic idea and then the chord/harmony that fit (hopefully) with that melody. My chords are Emaj, Cmaj, Amin, Emin, Fmaj, Gmaj, Fmaj, Bmaj.

I wanted to ask whether I’ve understood the YouTube tutorial correctly and get some kind of critique into how I’ve applied that to my own idea. I’m very new to thinking like this so any help would be greatly appreciated. It’s exciting to think that I can lead with a melody and then harmonise it rather than thinking “right I’ll play in the key of G major and will do a I–V–vi–IV chord progression G – D – Em – C”.

viz

Nice

digitalkettle

Yes, I think you're on the money there!

We do tend to think in terms of a melody line sat on some chords...but it's all just a big stack of harmony.

Not to knock what you've done (because you've just sketched it into a quick phone vid) but your melody kind of disappears into the chords...strictly, I think 'voice-leading' is most often a jazz thing with the melody as the 'top line'. So, as a discipline, I'd suggest really focusing on the melody and letting the chords serve it. They don't need to be tied together either, e.g.

• one melody note for multiple chords
• multiple melody notes for one chord

Other similar activities where weird shit can happen:

• Pick a note on any string...then play chords which feature that note
• Play a two note melody over a chord...move to another chord but keep the last melody note to start another two note melody...etc
• Forget about chords...get your melody...think about a bass line...get it hanging together...fill in some middle voices...they don't have to move in the same direction...can even stay static...they don't have to share the same rhythm, etc

denz32

digitalkettle said:

Yes, I think you're on the money there!

We do tend to think in terms of a melody line sat on some chords...but it's all just a big stack of harmony.

Not to knock what you've done (because you've just sketched it into a quick phone vid) but your melody kind of disappears into the chords...strictly, I think 'voice-leading' is most often a jazz thing with the melody as the 'top line'. So, as a discipline, I'd suggest really focusing on the melody and letting the chords serve it. They don't need to be tied together either, e.g.

• one melody note for multiple chords
• multiple melody notes for one chord

Other similar activities where weird shit can happen:

• Pick a note on any string...then play chords which feature that note
• Play a two note melody over a chord...move to another chord but keep the last melody note to start another two note melody...etc
• Forget about chords...get your melody...think about a bass line...get it hanging together...fill in some middle voices...they don't have to move in the same direction...can even stay static...they don't have to share the same rhythm, etc

Thanks for the feedback, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I agree that my chords are a bit overpowering and it does make the melody harder to hear. Also, on reflection it feels funny that I ended up moving chords with literally every melody note. It makes everything feel a bit rigid.

Thanks as well for the exercises you suggested. I’ve been experimenting with picking a single note and then trying different chord voicings that include that note, and thinking about what role that note is playing in each chord. I really like the other suggestions too so will get practicing these ideas. 

monquixote

I've been working on trying to do the same thing. 

Check out the last few posts here to see what I've been up to with notes:
https://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/230451/share-your-groovebox-electronic-creations#latest


I think the advice about voice leading is a bit backwards. 

You create your chord sequence and then you use voice leading to make the changes sound smooth. This is basically choosing inversions / voicings that have the smallest changes in notes between the same chords. You can do this if your chords are pretty vanilla or totally off the wall. 

If you want to use some weird chords then you have a few choices.

Secondary Dominants: The dominant chord (the V7 of the next chord) can pretty much always be inserted and sound good. That's one of the ways that jazz players add extra chords to stuff. Loads of songs do this.

Tritone substitution: You can swap a dominant 7 for another chord with the third and the 7th switched around. This is very smooth jazzy

Chromatic Mediant: You can swap to a completely outside chord a third away as long as one note stays the same. This is the star wars imperial march move. Sounds really weird, super cool and cinematic

Modal interchange: You can basically borrow any chord from a scale that starts on the same note. For example you can be in C major and then borrow Fm from C minor to do that classic major to minor move that is in Under the bridge among others.


David Bennett is brilliant for this sort of thing and has a video with song examples of anything you can imagine.

Also a couple of really cool videos on using modal interchange:

digitalkettle

monquixote said:

...
I think the advice about voice leading is a bit backwards. 

You create your chord sequence and then you use voice leading to make the changes sound smooth. This is basically choosing inversions / voicings that have the smallest changes in notes between the same chords. You can do this if your chords are pretty vanilla or totally off the wall. 
...

Valid points @monquixote .

You're walking the dog...a piece of music starts happening in your head...you whistle:
a. the melody
b. the chord sequence
I think a. is far more likely and tends to be the thing you're trying to express. In reality, we probably do a bit of everything all at once.

The OP was taking first steps in not being bound by a context before he even begins...your, more theoretical, options will be useful though. They can explain cool sounds one discovers or serve to get one out of a rut.

Sounds like, as a starting point, you're quite chord-driven then. You're referencing your electronic stuff which is odd to me because I'm such a bad keys player that, when I add a MIDI instrument to a recording, I have to think in lines of harmony rather than chords

monquixote

digitalkettle said:

monquixote said:

...
I think the advice about voice leading is a bit backwards. 

You create your chord sequence and then you use voice leading to make the changes sound smooth. This is basically choosing inversions / voicings that have the smallest changes in notes between the same chords. You can do this if your chords are pretty vanilla or totally off the wall. 
...

Valid points @monquixote .

You're walking the dog...a piece of music starts happening in your head...you whistle:
a. the melody
b. the chord sequence
I think a. is far more likely and tends to be the thing you're trying to express. In reality, we probably do a bit of everything all at once.

The OP was taking first steps in not being bound by a context before he even begins...your, more theoretical, options will be useful though. They can explain cool sounds one discovers or serve to get one out of a rut.

Sounds like, as a starting point, you're quite chord-driven then. You're referencing your electronic stuff which is odd to me because I'm such a bad keys player that, when I add a MIDI instrument to a recording, I have to think in lines of harmony rather than chords

I was responding specifically about the ask to have "All kinds of crazy chords" 

It's quite rare that I will go massively outside if I just write a melody and things end up being boring and very diatonic. Often I'll think "This is just boring" and want to add some drama. At that point the chords matter as the melody is only contextualised by the chords under it. I'm a really big fan of having a repeating melody and changing the chords under it for example.

Another option is to deliberately use a different scale like Phrygian Dominant, but ultimately it's just another way of ending up in the same place.

thecolourbox

monquixote said:

Tritone substitution: You can swap a dominant 7 for another chord with the third and the 7th switched around. This is very smooth jazzy

A query from pedant's corner, unless i'm misreading what you've said, I don't think that's what I understand as tritone substitution. I understood it be when, say you're in C major, instead of playing your perfect cadence as G7 > C, you swap the G7 chord for a D flat 7th chord, D Flat being a tritone away from G (3 whole tones)

thecolourbox

I found the youtube video quite confusing but I think that's sometimes the case for me if I already have a kind of process for doing similar things, hearing other people describe it sounds weird to me but it's not that it's wrong.

I think I kind of do this when I write, though i'm not necessarily saying I'm very good at it. My songs still sound quite boring and predictable to me but I suppose that's cos I know what's coming and follow my instincts when writing

I'll usually busk through some ideas and come up with something really uninteresting and obvious based on guitar or piano chord shapes. Then I tend to work on each change in turn to d usually anything but what I did originally, so it should sound more interesting or not the usual. Sometimes the "melody" of the chord sequence guides the tune, sometimes it's the melody of the tune which guides the harmony I suppose. Rather than "what chord can i use here based on these notes or based on what's gone before", I go along the lines of what feeling do I want to happen here. I think your chap in the video touched on that a bit with the tension note. So for example I start with my tonic chord, what do I want next? I want some tension with a dischord, and for the harmony tune to go darker. Ok So it needs to be a slightly discordant chord lower than the current one, ideally not one which will resolve neatly back to a diatonic or consonant chord. A minor 3rd down, it'll sound like the same chord with some added dissonance. Major third down it'll sound like a bold jump. Diminished 5th down it'll sound heartbreaking. Just randomly try a few until it's the sound you want or something unexpected but you still like. Sometimes it's "something like that chord in Chopin's whatever" or "let's do a Stevie Wonder here". If it's close but not quite right, just change which note of the chord is in the bass, that also adds a bit of uncertainty sometimes which helps if you're trying to create some conflict

One of my composition challenge entries which did well was essentially following this process on the chorus. The chord sequence ended up as

Bm7 > Bm7/A > G7/F > F#7/E
Bm7 > Fdim > F#7 > F#9
Bm7 >  Bm7/A > E9/G# > Gm6
Fdim > F#7> Bm

But the 1st three lines all started as what I think is called the "line cliche" of descending down Bm>Bm/A>Bm/G#>F#. Like Hit the Road Jack basically. But changing the obvious cliche points at the right points gives a much more interesting voice leading. I think, anyway. In most cases I just used unexpected chords which used some of the same notes as the scale, like Gm6 looks odd but it's essentially a G diminished with the C# sharpened to a D, all notes within the scale but just sounds more obvious than just barre-chording your way through

Barre chording your way through is just as good in the right scenario though!

monquixote

thecolourbox said:

monquixote said:

Tritone substitution: You can swap a dominant 7 for another chord with the third and the 7th switched around. This is very smooth jazzy

A query from pedant's corner, unless i'm misreading what you've said, I don't think that's what I understand as tritone substitution. I understood it be when, say you're in C major, instead of playing your perfect cadence as G7 > C, you swap the G7 chord for a D flat 7th chord, D Flat being a tritone away from G (3 whole tones)

Yes that's also true but that's the reason why it works because a tritone moved by a tritone remains the same notes so that's why the substitution works.

thecolourbox

monquixote said:

thecolourbox said:

monquixote said:

Tritone substitution: You can swap a dominant 7 for another chord with the third and the 7th switched around. This is very smooth jazzy

A query from pedant's corner, unless i'm misreading what you've said, I don't think that's what I understand as tritone substitution. I understood it be when, say you're in C major, instead of playing your perfect cadence as G7 > C, you swap the G7 chord for a D flat 7th chord, D Flat being a tritone away from G (3 whole tones)

Yes that's also true but that's the reason why it works because a tritone moved by a tritone remains the same notes so that's why the substitution works.

I'm not sure I follow, in the C major example cos it's easiest, instead of G7 you'd play Db7, yes there are two notes in common (F and but also two quite different notes. I forget which way round it is (German and French 6ths) but whichever one the "other way" is, where the Ab is flattened to G, i guess that's closer to being the same notes, almost as much as to say it's not a Db7 but a G7 with flattened 5th. But it's still a different chord to me, maybe I'm talking out my arse as usual

monquixote

thecolourbox said:

monquixote said:

thecolourbox said:

monquixote said:

Tritone substitution: You can swap a dominant 7 for another chord with the third and the 7th switched around. This is very smooth jazzy

A query from pedant's corner, unless i'm misreading what you've said, I don't think that's what I understand as tritone substitution. I understood it be when, say you're in C major, instead of playing your perfect cadence as G7 > C, you swap the G7 chord for a D flat 7th chord, D Flat being a tritone away from G (3 whole tones)

Yes that's also true but that's the reason why it works because a tritone moved by a tritone remains the same notes so that's why the substitution works.

I'm not sure I follow, in the C major example cos it's easiest, instead of G7 you'd play Db7, yes there are two notes in common (F and but also two quite different notes. I forget which way round it is (German and French 6ths) but whichever one the "other way" is, where the Ab is flattened to G, i guess that's closer to being the same notes, almost as much as to say it's not a Db7 but a G7 with flattened 5th. But it's still a different chord to me, maybe I'm talking out my arse as usual

I think I'm just not explaining it very well, but this is how it was explained to me.

So the idea is that with the G7 the most important two notes are the 3rd (B) and 7th (F) and they give it the spicy character because they are a clashy tritone. So if you switch the G7 for a Db7 then the two most important notes are the 3rd (F) and the 7th (B) which as you can see have been flipped.
So the reason the substitution works is because the two most important notes from a functional perspective are the tritone between B and F which your ear still hears and accepts the chord as having the dominant function even though the other notes are all different. 
So it's a tritone substitution not just because you move it by a tritone, but also because you are substituting the tritone for an equivalent tritone B-F to F-B.

Ultimately it all just means if you move a 7 chord by a tritone it sounds cool and jazzy and that's all that matters, but I thought that was kind of cool.

monquixote

thecolourbox said:

I found the youtube video quite confusing but I think that's sometimes the case for me if I already have a kind of process for doing similar things, hearing other people describe it sounds weird to me but it's not that it's wrong.

I think I kind of do this when I write, though i'm not necessarily saying I'm very good at it. My songs still sound quite boring and predictable to me but I suppose that's cos I know what's coming and follow my instincts when writing

I'll usually busk through some ideas and come up with something really uninteresting and obvious based on guitar or piano chord shapes. Then I tend to work on each change in turn to d usually anything but what I did originally, so it should sound more interesting or not the usual. Sometimes the "melody" of the chord sequence guides the tune, sometimes it's the melody of the tune which guides the harmony I suppose. Rather than "what chord can i use here based on these notes or based on what's gone before", I go along the lines of what feeling do I want to happen here. I think your chap in the video touched on that a bit with the tension note. So for example I start with my tonic chord, what do I want next? I want some tension with a dischord, and for the harmony tune to go darker. Ok So it needs to be a slightly discordant chord lower than the current one, ideally not one which will resolve neatly back to a diatonic or consonant chord. A minor 3rd down, it'll sound like the same chord with some added dissonance. Major third down it'll sound like a bold jump. Diminished 5th down it'll sound heartbreaking. Just randomly try a few until it's the sound you want or something unexpected but you still like. Sometimes it's "something like that chord in Chopin's whatever" or "let's do a Stevie Wonder here". If it's close but not quite right, just change which note of the chord is in the bass, that also adds a bit of uncertainty sometimes which helps if you're trying to create some conflict

One of my composition challenge entries which did well was essentially following this process on the chorus. The chord sequence ended up as

Bm7 > Bm7/A > G7/F > F#7/E
Bm7 > Fdim > F#7 > F#9
Bm7 >  Bm7/A > E9/G# > Gm6
Fdim > F#7> Bm

But the 1st three lines all started as what I think is called the "line cliche" of descending down Bm>Bm/A>Bm/G#>F#. Like Hit the Road Jack basically. But changing the obvious cliche points at the right points gives a much more interesting voice leading. I think, anyway. In most cases I just used unexpected chords which used some of the same notes as the scale, like Gm6 looks odd but it's essentially a G diminished with the C# sharpened to a D, all notes within the scale but just sounds more obvious than just barre-chording your way through

Barre chording your way through is just as good in the right scenario though!

This is very similar to how I think about it, but I'm not all that experienced with theory yet so my songs are still quite simple or sometimes I write stuff and I don't really know why it works, but it sounds alright. 

I've found Gemini really helpful for this as it can explain what the chord is and why it works in that context.

thecolourbox

monquixote said:

thecolourbox said:

monquixote said:

thecolourbox said:

monquixote said:

Tritone substitution: You can swap a dominant 7 for another chord with the third and the 7th switched around. This is very smooth jazzy

A query from pedant's corner, unless i'm misreading what you've said, I don't think that's what I understand as tritone substitution. I understood it be when, say you're in C major, instead of playing your perfect cadence as G7 > C, you swap the G7 chord for a D flat 7th chord, D Flat being a tritone away from G (3 whole tones)

Yes that's also true but that's the reason why it works because a tritone moved by a tritone remains the same notes so that's why the substitution works.

I'm not sure I follow, in the C major example cos it's easiest, instead of G7 you'd play Db7, yes there are two notes in common (F and but also two quite different notes. I forget which way round it is (German and French 6ths) but whichever one the "other way" is, where the Ab is flattened to G, i guess that's closer to being the same notes, almost as much as to say it's not a Db7 but a G7 with flattened 5th. But it's still a different chord to me, maybe I'm talking out my arse as usual

I think I'm just not explaining it very well, but this is how it was explained to me.

So the idea is that with the G7 the most important two notes are the 3rd (B) and 7th (F) and they give it the spicy character because they are a clashy tritone. So if you switch the G7 for a Db7 then the two most important notes are the 3rd (F) and the 7th (B) which as you can see have been flipped.
So the reason the substitution works is because the two most important notes from a functional perspective are the tritone between B and F which your ear still hears and accepts the chord as having the dominant function even though the other notes are all different. 
So it's a tritone substitution not just because you move it by a tritone, but also because you are substituting the tritone for an equivalent tritone B-F to F-B.

Ultimately it all just means if you move a 7 chord by a tritone it sounds cool and jazzy and that's all that matters, but I thought that was kind of cool.

Yes i see what you mean now from that. As you say, it sounds cool, and that's worth having in your Armoury ! 

I used to be a jazz pianist, or rather, i got a job as a jazz pianist despite being a classical pianist, so I had to learn a lot of the jazz stuff. In the case of the tritone substitution, i had to learn how to make it sound jazzy rather than classical (from where i knew it as a German or French or Neapolitan 6th )