Talk:Voicing (music)

message: This article is a complete waste of space.  The aesthetic ramifications of choosing different voicings is inappropriate for an article like this, which should focus on explaining what voicings are.  The fundamental concept isn't explained at all (or rather is mis-explained).  I'm inclined to trash the whole article and start over, but I don't want to get caught in an edit war like I guess happened with the Inversion page. 69.235.206.113 08:00, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: When are you going to log on so we can engage seriously? Tony (talk) 10:34, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Right now, I'm not sure if it's more hassle than it's worth.  I just saw a particularly poor article which had a request for somebody who knew something about the subject to help out.  I won't claim that what I wrote was amazing, but I think it was cogent, mostly.  I'm not a super music theory expert, being particularly weak with counterpoint and the classical approach, and I don't know how they might do a treatment on the subject.  I come from the Mark Harrison school of music theory (author of "Contemporary Music Theory" vol I-III), and would be quite content to see the contemporary viewpoint presented alongside the classical viewpoint (if they even have much to say on the subject).  Also, the article may be misnamed, as I am only really talking about chord voicings.  If people use the term "voicings" in other contexts, though, I've not heard it, and I would expect the article to be named "Chord_voicings" or "Voicings (chord)" or somesuch.  Finally, the study of voicings is deep, and I'm not sure what level of detail you consider appropriate for an article like this.  Voicing techniques vary by instrument and potentially warrant their own articles, if their is enough interest.  That would allow the main article to merely explain what voicings are and defer all examples and discussion of how voicings are created/chosen to individual instrument articles.  Anyway, I'll keep an eye on this to see your response, and if things seem to be sufficiently collegial, then I'll log in. 69.235.224.93 18:27, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Vague criticisms

message: This is an embarrassment, and should be deleted or completely rewritten. The tone is wrong, the information uncited, prescriptive, and shallow, since it provides no reasons for its assertions. IV6 clouds IV? Hello? Tony (talk) 14:32, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's really not THAT bad. If anything it doesn't fall into the trap of burying itself in theory only. 98.210.109.176 (talk) 07:27, 21 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Appalling little article 

message: I'd like to add this about drop voicings but I don't have the software to make the illustrations. Please somebody make some illustrations and add that a "drop 2" voicing is created by taking the second voice from the top of a close position voicing and dropping it an octave. For example, (reading up) [C, G, E] and [E, C, G] and [G, E, C] are all "drop 2" voicings of a C triad. Similarly, "drop 3" voicings are found by dropping the third voice from the top of a close position voicing down an octave such as this "drop 3" voicing of a C7 chord [C, Bb, E, G]. By the same method, there are also "drop 2 and 4" voicings such as [C, G, E, Bb] and [G, C, Bb, E]. (That person that said a "drop 5" voicing means the 5th of the chord is dropped below the 3rd of a chord had it all wrong. The numbers have nothing to do with the chord members, but rather with the voice numbers, counting down from the highest voice as voice 1. I took that error out of the article.) Another Stickler (talk) 10:37, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The section and explanation is added. Someone please add the illustrations. 108.60.216.202 (talk) 22:53, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Drop voicings. 

message: Why, what, where, and how does this article need attention from an expert on the subject? Hyacinth (talk) 17:08, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Tag removed. Hyacinth (talk) 08:03, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Expert attention

message: CarrotSalad (talk) 21:22, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you have any suggestions? Hyacinth (talk) 06:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

text: 174.29.252.201, "at least one for each of the chord's pitch classes" is incorrect. Omissions are fine. Consider what jazz pianists call "rootless voicings" for the left hand, which don't get in the way of the bass player. For example, a G13#11 chord has seven members [G B D F A C# E], but a pianist might play any of various fewer-than-seven-note left-hand voicings, such as (reading upward) [F B E], [F A B E], [F B C# E], [F A C# E], [F A B C# E], etc. 76.94.246.25 (talk) 02:02, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need Clean Definition of Voicing 

message: "Which note is on the bottom determines the inversion."
I removed that misleading sentence. There wasn't room in the edit summary to say why. Voicings don't have "inversions". Only chords have inversions, which determine the bass of the chord, and the bass of a chord is not the same thing as the bottom note in a voicing. 
A chord has exactly as many inversions as members, or, if you prefer, one fewer inversions than members. For example, a triad, harmonically speaking, has root position, where the root is in the bass, first inversion, where the third is in the bass, and second inversion, where the fifth is in the bass. But each of those inversions can generate indefinite numbers of voicings. 
The bottom note in a voicing doesn't have to be the bass of the chord, especially when instruments are combined. If a pianist and bass player play together, it's likely that the pianist will avoid playing the same note as the bass player and will choose voicings in higher registers that have different notes in the bottom. That doesn't change the harmonic sense of the chord inversion. It's just a voicing for that instrument. For example, with a chord progression from G7 to C9, the bass will probably play G to C notes (the roots), but the pianist might play rootless three-note voicings in the left hand (reading up) F B D (seventh on the bottom and missing the root) to E Bb D (third on the bottom and missing the root and fifth) while playing the melody with the right hand. 204.27.56.170 (talk) 03:40, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed misleading sentence 

message: Does anyone else see problems in the Doubling section? It's cited but it looks wrong. I don't have the cited book to check if the errors come from the book or the contributor. I suspect that the errors are paraphrases rather than quotes, but I'm hesitant to correct them without access to the original. Does anyone else have it? Can you fix it? The Debussy's Sarabande example should be called "parallelism", not "non-octave doubling" (which I don't think is a real term). There's a huge sentence that tries to define too many terms at the same time and confuses itself. For example, it contains "doubling at other intervals...is...duplicating...at the same pitch or at different octaves." Grammatically, that's saying that all intervals are equivalent to primes or octaves! "Melodic doubling in parallel" sounds like a made-up crush of multiple terms. Doubling means duplicating the same pitch. Everything else is parallelism of one sort or another. Some of the applicable well-defined terms include "parallel motion" (where the direction must be consistent but not necessarily the width), parallel octaves (a way of strengthening the melody), parallel fifths (a thing to supposedly avoid in certain counterpoint idioms but which is well used in various other types of music), chromatic parallelism (where the width must be strictly maintained), and diatonic parallelism (where the width can vary as long as the number of scale steps is consistent). Sometimes people also say "doubled at the octave", which is equivalent to "parallel octaves". "8vb" means "an octave below", "8va" means "an octave above". "15vb" and "15va" are similar for double octaves. I don't think anyone ever says "doubled at a non-octave" though. 199.189.86.27 (talk) 02:18, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Doubling 

message: It looks me that the three chord of the Vertical Placement section sound exactly the same. I'm not an experienced musician so maybe I wrong.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.29.96.148 (talk) 17:44, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's pretty hard to hear with piano. I changed it to vibraphone to make it clearer. Squandermania (talk) 16:22, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible error 

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thread_title:  Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for deletion