How To Get The Most Out Of “Stock” Voicing Options
When you step into an arranging classroom there is one topic you can expect to be taught: voicings. However, depending on who your teacher is, you may come out of the experience with vastly different relationships with what voicings are and how you can use them. At the surface level most arranging classes teach the same standard voicing shapes, simply giving a technique and not unpacking why you may actually want to, or not want to, incorporate it into your own writing.
Just last night after a session with the current Arranging 101 cohort I had a lovely discussion with one of the participants who had this exact experience while at university and it reminded me of a situation I ran into sometime a year ago. One of my private students came to a lesson asking for help with some of the stock voicing shapes they had just been taught in their university arranging class. The task at hand was to apply the voicing shapes to the given melodies. Nothing too crazy. The interesting part was that given the context of the melodies, it made no sense to use the specific voicing shape and from my conversation with the student it seemed as if context was never mentioned during the class. The problem with this mentality is that you come away thinking that you can apply the same voicing technique everywhere and that it will work.
After the lesson finished I had a moment of reflection back to the time I was introduced to the same voicing shapes and felt very appreciative to have learned how to apply them to different situations. You see, my professor Rich DeRosa not only introduced the techniques by themselves, but also gave out the crucial piece of advice about where it may not be wise to use them for one reason or another. Although I may not have realized it at the time, this simple piece of advice likely saved me a number of hours of mistakes over the years.
So what are the standard voicings I’m talking about? They’re called drop 2, and drop 2+4. Both are widely popular in arranging and have been for decades. Starting with a 4 note closed position voicing, a drop 2 is when you take the second note from the top and displace it by an octave. Whereas a drop 2+4 is when you take the second and fourth note from the top and displace both of them by an octave.
However just knowing the voicings will land you in the same situation my private student was in. To fully understand both techniques we need to talk about why you might want to use them. Fortunately it’s a one word answer: Range.
When you start voicing for horn sections that are made up of multiple different types of instruments, such as a sax section which has 2 altos, 2 tenors, and a bari, they all have different ranges. The common approach is to put them in a closed position voicing first but at a certain point when the melody gets too high, the lower horns (tenor and bari in this case) may start playing in a higher register than the top horns (altos). This can result in balance issues and having certain inner chord tones project over the melody note.
That’s when drop 2 or drop 2+4 voicings come into play. By dropping the second voice by an octave, it reshuffles the orchestration of the chord, lowering the tenors and bari. Drop 2+4 does this to an even greater extent. They both help equalize the voicing and are specifically used when the melody note goes too high. Yes, the voicing shapes can be used in other places, but results will vary depending on the context.
Although I’ve used a sax section example here, these stock voicings can be used in small horn sections too. One of the most common being trumpet, trumpet, tenor sax, trombone. When the trumpet melody gets too high, all of the other instruments in a closed voicing get brought into their high register which may be problematic. That’s when you would look at using one of the drop techniques. However, sometimes the melody note is simply too high and the drop voicings won’t work. In this case you have to opt for a different technique instead.
Both drop 2 and drop 2+4 are great techniques and the popularity of both of them proves it. Just remember to not rush in blindly when applying them and to take a second to think about how both techniques impact the register of the instruments playing the notes.
And there we have it. Only one newsletter entry left for January which means only one more on the topic of voicings. For next week we will be breaking from the stock voicing techniques and looking at the age old argument of vertical vs horizontal motion and which is more important when it comes to voicings.
Thanks,
Toshi