“You can only break the rules if you know what the rules are”: How changing up your chord voicing can make your music sound more expansive

Overheard shot of hands on a piano.

Improving the chord voicings within your song or production will add a musical element that will help elevate your work to the next level. But to help explain what a voicing is, you’ll forgive us if we kick-off with a food related analogy! All musicians like food, right?

Think of a bowl of spaghetti, with all of that lovely tomato sauce on top; the spaghetti is our chosen chord symbol, and the sauce is/are the notes contained within that chord. We need to blend/mix the two elements together, so that the notes (sauce) are spread evenly throughout the chord (spaghetti). That’s what we call a voicing!

It’s essentially how we arrange and place the notes across the range of instruments that we’re using.