Chord Inversions and Voicings

from Keyboard Guide by Jeromy Bessler and Norbert Opgenoorth Copyright 1995 by Voggenreiter Publishers. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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A given chord can have many different forms. These forms are often called voicings. The most basic voicing is the "root position": all chord tones are stacked in thirds on top of each other. Another way of arranging the notes of a given chord is to build so-called inversions. This simply means transposing the lowest voice of a chord up an octave, making it the melody note. Using a triad, you can build two inversions:

Yet another way of voicing a chord is the "wide position." A chord is said to be in a wide position if you can insert another one of its chord tones between any two of its tones:
Naturally, you can also invert chords in wide position.

Sound good so far? There is, however, one little problem: many chords don't sound so good in their "normal" inverted form. For the example below we took a Cmaj7/b9 chord and simply built the first inversion. Most people will probably agree that this chord sounds quite awful. There are three chord tones voiced a half step apart from each other:

As you can see, simply inverting this chord just isn't enough to get a satisfying sound; you have to think about chord voicings. We use the term voicing for all the different techniques to arrange the chord tones of a given chord. there are countless voicing techniques, of which here are just two examples:

• drop 2: in Jazz, this is a quite common voicing technique. To get a drop 2 voicing, simply transpose the second voice of the chord down an octave.
  
• drop 3 and drop 2+4: these drop variants are not very common. However, the principle remains the same: the indicated voices are transposed down an octave.
  
• You can also "invert" the drop-techniques, transposing chord tones up an octave.
  
  
• Another way of voicing chords is to leave out some of the chord tones. Be careful to keep the chord recognizable, though.

You should always have an open ear for your fellow musicians. As a rule of thumb, you can omit the chord tones already being played by other musicians in your own voicings. For instance, playing with a bass player, the root (normally the single most important chord tone) can often be omitted, since the bass player will be playing it already.

One thing to remember: you should always avoid voicing tension notes in the bass range. These can become much too dissonant and overpowering, dominate the whole chord and thus endanger its function. It should be mentioned again that all of these rules are just rough guidelines among many others. The advantages of a serious study of musical theory can't be stressed enough!

Another thing you should be aware of is to never view a chord in isolation, but always connected to its musical background, because this can heavily influence the appropriate voicing. The melody of a song, its harmonies, chord progressions and your own personal taste are all parameters that can't really be restricted by rules.

And yet another suggestion; music always comes first, rules follow second! A serious composer--regardless of musical styles, trends or the age he lives in--shouldn't be restricted by rules. In fact, he has to break them sometimes! There will always be (and always have been) people who like to see music as a strict network of never-changing rules; really great music has always been composed by the other ones.

A topic you may wish to explore further on your own is the division of chord tones between your hands (you could write a whole book on this subject alone). Some chords sound good if you play the two lowest voices with the left hand, others using drop technique, and still others have a nice tone if you play root and seventh with the left and all other chord tones with the right hand. Experiment for yourself and find your own favorite voicings!