And today we're talking about something that we had asked a lot about. These are four common voicing mistakes. These are four mistakes that you might be making. And we're going to tell you some things not to do to make your voicing sound better. We'll get into the very first one. Yeah, which is exactly this is going to work. And that is you're doubling too many notes. You're doing too much doubling. Right. And you don't have to do this much. Like you don't have to play as many notes as you think you do, and I hear this kind of voicing all the time. Right? Two C major sevens stacked on top of each other. Right. That sounds terrible. That's right. It just doesn't sound as full as it could sound, sound or as it could sound as if you, say, played like a C major 13.

With that's a little space.

There's some space.

There's no repeated notes in these voices.

You know, if you usually came up with this system for having voicings with any kind of melody note on top and not repeating any notes.

And for me to kind of create that really was a game changer.

And so anytime that you can break down what you're playing and take away the double notes, the repeated notes, it's going to sound way better.

And if it sounds thinner when you do that, then you probably have some weird architecture to your voicing that you need to take a note down an octave or up an octave or something like that. Alright, number two is only playing rooted or only playing rootless voicings. You got to play to the sound. You can't just put these hard rules where it's like, okay, there's a bass player, so I'm never going to play roots. Or I'm playing solo piano, so I'm always going to play roots. Don't be so dogmatic with that. Sometimes a good rooted voicing when you're playing with a bass player just fills out the chord in general. Like it sounds, that sounds one way. But with that root on the bottom, it sounds a completely different way. Another example would be like this C7-11 without the root, right? So if we have a bass player, that sounds totally cool. But if I wanted a little punchier, I'll throw in that C, it's not too low, it's not gonna be in the bass player's range. It just fills out the bottom end of that voicing. On the flip side, if I'm playing solo piano and just everything is just, you know, like has the root on and I'm going down, it's going to get too monotonous. You can actually come up and play rootless voicings all the time. And learn your, learn your inversions for your solo piano voicing.

Don't just go, you know, one, seven, three all the time.

Like, you can play more than the root.

Okay, so the number three of the common voicing mistakes, we hear, things that you don't

want to do, and that is not considering what came before and after the voicing that you're playing.

Context is king.

Context is king.

So what do we mean here?

There's a nice F-13 kind of thing, not a lot of doubling, nice kind of sound,

and then we're going to go B-flat on a blues.

Oh.

Where are we? What neighborhood are we in? Yeah, exactly. We're all over the place. None of those voicings are bad, but they're not part of a logical progression. I mean, you might be within the chord progression in the form, but there's not, like, the voice leading isn't there. Now, not to say you can't jump up, but there has to be a musical reason to do it. And you're still considering, there's a dramatic thing. You don't love this sound? Very good voice leading, I would say. Same shape, just moving around. Yeah. I mean, when you're starting out, you know, when you're starting out, that's fine. But we don't want that. When we,

when we are developing our voicing skills,

when we're learning how to really comp, accompany other people, we want to get great voice leading with the top voice, with the bottom voice, with the inner voices. That's like inner voice voice leading. That's like pro-level stuff, right?

When you're considering every note as its own voice.

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