Voice Motion: A Workbook for Guitar

This book focuses on the intersection of melody and harmony. While valuable for all instrumental and choral composers and arrangers, it specifically explores ways to move melodic voices independently within three-part harmony on the guitar. All you need to benefit from this book is the ability to read standard notation on the guitar. Working through this book will improve fretboard knowledge and help you write better melody-chord arrangements.

For the first time in print, VOICE MOTION presents a condensed, comprehensive list of all the possible ways for three voices to move in 2nds or 3rds within the context of common 7-note or heptatonic scales. With graphic illustrations that instantly reveal the nature of the motion (see front cover), the versatility of this list is unparalleled in modern music publishing.

VOICE MOTION contains not only the essential list of all possible moves, in close and open (drop-2) voicing, but also:

• Begins with a complete course on diatonic three-voice chords and continues with a structured presentation of the ways to move voices within them.
• Introduces a unique harmonic toolbox which can be used at any stage of a musician’s personal artistic development.
• Provides an overview of heptatonic harmony and melodic movement which can be used when writing for or playing three voices in any harmonic situation.
• Vastly expands the reader’s chord vocabulary while demonstrating a clear method for learning to move any harmonic voice independently, in any inversion.
• Definitively explores all relevant heptatonic scales, their modes and three-part chord structures as well as presenting many examples, exercises and etudes to demonstrate their practical application.
• Presents a fretboard diagram and C major diatonic and chromatic scale exercises in notation and tab to clarify note locations on the guitar.
• Offers a special section applying the book’s principles to keyboard instruments.

Includes access to online audio of select exercises and etudes plus three of the author’s original compositions demonstrating the techniques shown in this 316-page book.