Voice Leading in Four Parts

Four-part harmony sounds intimidating until you notice the whole discipline collapses into a single instruction: move each voice the smallest distance it can to reach the next chord. That is voice leading. You are not really choosing chords — the progression already did that — you are choosing the four paths between them, one per voice, and good voice leading is just the set of paths where nobody travels further than they have to. Take the move from a

Cmaj7 to a G7: on paper it is two symbols, but underneath it is eight notes and four small decisions about who holds still and who steps.

Key takeaways

Keep common tones in the same voice — if two chords share a note, leave it where it is and let the other voices move.

Move every other voice by the smallest step available, and favour contrary motion between the outer voices.

Resolve the leading tone up and the chordal seventh down; the ear is waiting for both.

The four voices

Split any chord onto four staves and you get the four voices, high to low: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. The name is borrowed from choral writing, but it applies to a guitar chord, a piano voicing, or a string quartet just as well — any time four independent lines make one harmony, you have four voices.

The word that matters there is independent. A block chord is four notes played at once; four-part writing is four melodies that happen to line up vertically. When you play Cmaj7 and then

G7, the listener does not hear "chord, then chord." They hear four little tunes moving at once — the bass walking, the soprano turning, the inner voices shuffling. Voice leading is the craft of making each of those tunes go somewhere sensible on its own while the harmony changes underneath all of them. If the geography of which chord follows which is still fuzzy, read The Circle of Fifths, Practically first — this post is about what happens between two chosen chords, not about choosing them.

Rule one: keep common tones in the same voice

Most chords a step or two apart on the circle share at least one note, and the first rule of smooth voice leading is to find that shared note and refuse to move it. Leave it sitting in the voice that already has it and let the other three sort themselves out around it.

Look at Fmaj7 moving to

Am7. Spell them out: Fmaj7 is F–A–C–E, and Am7 is A–C–E–G. Three of the four notes — A, C, and E — are common to both chords. So three of your four voices have nothing to do. If the alto is holding a C, keep it holding that C. Only the bass has real work, dropping from F to A; everyone else either stays put or barely nudges. The result is a change of harmony that the ear registers as motion without anyone lurching.

This is why closely related chords feel so easy to connect: they hand you the common tones for free. It is also the single fastest way to make an amateur voicing sound professional. Beginners tend to grab the nearest complete shape of each chord and jump the whole hand from one to the next; the fix is almost always "which note did these two chords have in common, and did you keep it?"

Rule two: move the rest by the smallest step

Once the common tones are anchored, every voice that does have to move should move as little as possible — ideally by a step, a semitone or a whole tone, not a leap. A voice that has to jump a fourth or a fifth usually means you grabbed the wrong inversion; back up and try a shape that keeps that voice closer to where it already was.

There is a second half to this rule that separates tidy voice leading from great voice leading: contrary motion. When the bass moves down, try to let the soprano move up, and vice versa. Voices heading in opposite directions keep the texture open and independent — the outer edges of the chord spread and contract like breathing, and the four lines stay audibly separate. Parallel motion, where two voices move the same direction by the same interval, does the opposite: it glues the voices together.

Parallel perfect fifths and octaves are the classic four-part trap. When two voices a fifth (or an octave) apart both step in the same direction and land a fifth (or octave) apart again, the ear briefly hears them as one thickened voice instead of two — and the independence you worked for collapses. Check every pair of voices between two chords, not just the bass against the soprano; the sneaky parallels usually hide between the inner voices.

Contrary motion is the cheapest insurance against those parallels. If the bass is falling and the soprano is rising, they physically cannot move in parallel with each other, and you have already removed the most audible mistake in the book.

Rule three: resolve the tendency tones

Some notes are unstable on purpose. They lean, and the ear expects them to resolve a specific way. Honour those expectations and a dominant chord melts into its tonic without anyone noticing the mechanics; ignore them and the progression sounds like it stopped mid-sentence.

Two tendency tones matter most. The leading tone — the seventh degree of the scale, the B in C major — sits a semitone below home and wants to rise into it. The chordal seventh of a dominant chord — the F in a

G7 — wants to fall a step. Those two notes are the tritone inside the dominant, the interval that makes it feel like tension in the first place, and they resolve outward and inward respectively: B up to C, F down to E.

A single upper voice holds F through the Dm7 and the G7, then steps down to E over the Cmaj7.

One voice across ii–V–I in C: the F is common to Dm7 and G7, then falls a step to the E of Cmaj7 — the seventh resolving down.

That is a single voice doing rules one and three at once: it keeps the common tone F through the Dm7 and the

G7, then resolves the seventh down a step to the E of Cmaj7. The leading tone lives in another voice: while this line falls B-to-E's neighbour, the B in the G7 climbs a semitone to the C in the tonic. Two voices, two tiny opposite moves, and the whole ii–V–I lands.

A worked example, one voice at a time

Put all three rules on the same progression. Here is

Dm7 → G7 → Cmaj7 in C, traced voice by voice rather than chord by chord.

Bass: D → G → C. This one gets to leap — the bass is the foundation, and its falling-fifth roots are the whole reason a ii–V–I sounds so resolved. Let it move; the point of the other three voices is to stay smooth over it.

Tenor: F → F → E. The common tone F holds across the first two chords, then resolves the G7's seventh down a step. This is the line in the notation above.

Alto: A → B → C. A steps up to the leading tone B in the G7, and the leading tone rises a semitone to C. Rule three, going up.

Soprano: C → D → E. A calm, mostly stepwise top line — and notice it rises while the bass falls. That is contrary motion between the outer voices, exactly what rule two asked for.

No voice moves more than a step except the bass, every voice has somewhere to be, and the two tendency tones resolve the way the ear predicted. That is the entire craft. It is not four independent puzzles — solve the common tones first, then the tendency tones, and the remaining voices usually have exactly one comfortable place left to go.

Build it, then hear it

You can read these three rules in one sitting, but they only become instinct once you hear the difference between a voicing that leads well and one that jumps. Reading gets you a third of the way; your ears do the rest, and the fastest way to train them is to build a progression, hear it, and then nudge one voice at a time until you can feel the smooth path and the clumsy one apart.

That loop is exactly what I built Homechord for. Sketch a

ii–V–I, play it back, then deliberately break the voice leading — jump a common tone, force a parallel — and hear how much rougher the same chords sound. Then fix it and hear it settle. Do that a dozen times and the rules stop being rules; they become the version of each chord your hand reaches for by default. Once smooth voice leading is automatic, the harmony you already know — the ii–V–I hiding in every playlist — starts to sound like it was always meant to move that way.

Homechord

A composition assistant for chord progressions — sketch, hear it instantly, and swap chords with smart suggestions.

Web

iOS & Android — soon

Open Homechord →