Building a Voicing Vocabulary

By Tyler Blanton

When I was starting out with Jazz vibes, a big challenge for me was comping through tunes. I had a

handful of voicing that I liked and thought sounded good, but when a tune was flying by, I just didn’t

have the breadth of voicings at my disposal to really fill in the harmony and support the soloist. I also just

felt like I was randomly jumping from one voicing to the next, without really being able to make musical

statements. For a long while, when it came time to comp, I was just in survival mode, hoping to grab

whatever chord happened to by familiar enough to place at the moment the harmony went by. My mental

dialogue would often sound like this; “Ok….C7….Fmajor… that’s down here…..Ab minor…whoops…

missed it…Ok…C7 voicing again...” The method which I’m going to introduce helped me a lot in this

arena. It was originally shown to me by my friend and mentor, a great guitarist from The San Francisco

Bay area named Randy Vincent.

The exercise starts by taking a basic turnaround, I,VI,ii,V progression and ascends with all voices to the

next possible inversion of the chord that follows. Here is an example in the key of F.

Remember, every voice of each chord must either repeat or ascend into the next voicing, for now.

The second step is to do this starting on different inversions with the first chord.

What goes up must come down, so we need to be able to do this same thing descending;

Some of these voicings get pretty high for comping, but the idea right now is to just see all the inversions,

even though some may not be useful in all registers. If you work these through all the keys you’ll

eventually hit all the inversions of every chord. It is very important to see all the inversions of these

chords with only the chord tones, but as soon as possible we want to start adding color tones and shedding

the root and 5th to make the voicings richer.

First we’re going to substitute the root of the chord with the 9th, to add more color;

Next, we can substitute the 13 or 11 for the 5

ths

We can also alter the 9th, 11

th and 13

th;

Here is an example of these voicings over the first 8 bars of the tune “Have You Met Miss Jones”;

We need to be careful of the monotony that can occur as the result of playing too many repeated blocked

chords. Here is an example that uses the same basic framework from the last example, but introduces a

little more melody and rhythmic variety;

All these examples use more- or- less close position voicings. In the next lesson I’ll expand to include

wider spread voicing with drop 2 inversions which will become an equally valuable part of your voicing

vocabulary. However, If you spend the time to become familiar with these in close position, it will make

the voicing in the next lesson easier to learn.