The art of sound it is a way in which one distributes or spaces the notes of the chords. When you listen to music, you probably focus on the melody. That’s the familiar part of a tune that’s easy to listen to.
When you sing or hum part of the music, it is the melody and not the background that you are thinking about. For this important part of the music to stand out, the melody must be louder than the accompaniment. However, this is not always easy to do.
Each voice should flow seamlessly into the next, and your hands will most likely move just a little. When voicing chords, he draws attention to certain notes more than others. So sometimes instead of using a clear melody, artists play a bunch of double notes and chords. You should always voice all double notes and chords to give them more clarity.
If you’re playing all the notes at the same volume, you won’t be able to hear the melody very clearly. So you’ll want to pick a note in each chord to play a little louder. This is what we mean by expressing.
If your hands are jumping all over the place, you’re probably not using good voice direction. The art of leading the voice is the smooth movement of notes from one chord to the next. Quite often the note you need to pronounce is at the top of the chord, but sometimes the middle voices have hidden melodies that are more interesting than the top voice.
When looking at a chord passage in your music, decide which voice needs more sound and which can be played softer. Listen to other recordings of pianists highlighting the upper voice of each chord in the right hand.
With practice, try playing the middle note of a chord louder than the other two notes. Next, focus on the bottom note of a chord. Think about the chords that are sung in a choir. Each note is a different voice like bass, tenor, alto, and soprano. Her ear will usually hear the soprano sing and ride along the melody line. Those wonderful harmony parts add a lot of color, flavor and tone to the background of the song.
The voices become easier to play and you’ll find that your hands hardly move at all, especially when dealing with shell voices, as the roots move down on fifths or up on fourths. You’ll learn more bebop-style left-hand voices, rootless left-hand voices, and rootless shell voices later. When the left hand plays the third and seventh of each chord, these rootless shell voices give the right hand the freedom to improvise.
