From the course: Music Theory for Songwriters: The Fundamentals

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What is voice leading?

What is voice leading?

From the course: Music Theory for Songwriters: The Fundamentals

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What is voice leading?

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- When we hear two or more people singing together in harmony, what are we hearing? We hear the melody, which is the leading line of tone and one or more harmony lines, which are notes related to the melody at different intervals. Voicing refers to how the notes of harmony are ordered and spaced. We've discussed this and how those voices can be spread out across multiple singers or instruments. Let's apply these voicings to our songwriting using a concept called voice leading. Where we treat each note of a harmony as an individual voice. So far, we've looked at harmony vertically, stacking notes on top of each other into chords. However, with voice leading, we look at the harmony notes from a horizontal perspective, thinking of each harmony as being its own melody and the easier that each melody is to sing, the better. Thus, the first basic rule of thumb for voice leading is to have a note travel up or down in pitch as…

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