The idea
Consistency is what makes a piece about something. Voice-leading is what makes the chords under it feel like one continuous thing rather than a list.
Greg's diagnosis of your EP was precise and it splits into these two halves: "You had a lot of consistency in the thing that you played me before, but there was not really movement in it." A13 gave you movement through goal notes. This lesson protects the half you already have, and shows you the second, quieter source of it, which is what happens between the chords.
The source course states the principle in one line: "a chord is not a static object, it is a momentary alignment of moving voices" (Source course, Lesson 4). And its consequence for a keyboard player: "You stop selecting chords and start moving voices."
That is the whole lesson. A piece is about one idea, carried; the harmony under it is a set of lines, not a set of objects.
Watch
Learning Bill Evans Solo Technique (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuCdd4lLMuk)
- The concept, attributed to Evans directly: pick one single note and make it the goal point of every line [00:09]. "It gives solos structure and it gives your lines structure" [00:38], and then, he says, a form and musicality.
- The vehicle is "Waltz for Debby," in F, goal note C, chosen because it is the tune's first note [00:30].
- What he does with it: he keeps the note as a constant, "but just deviated away from it and led back" [02:56].
- The problem case worth stealing. When the A section moves to the key of A, the C is gone. He takes the nearest available note, C♯, and holds that instead [04:12]. "Then it kind of sounds like you're trying to get back to your home base but you can't really. And then eventually, once the home base becomes part of the chord, then you can get back" [04:27]. He waits for the G minor, the ii of F, to return [05:01]. Learning Herbie Hancock Solo Technique (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hsN6aAWLGk)
- Consistency of color rather than of pitch. One scale, the minor-major, 1, 2, ♭3, 4, 5, natural 6, natural 7 [00:44], used as the identity of a whole performance.
- How it stays interesting without changing: superimposition. A♭ minor-major played over a C bass, then back to C [01:26].
- Over "Footprints" he uses the real ending turnaround, F♯, B, E, A, not the shortcut [02:31]. Learn the real one. Voiceleading exercise (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg-EP4rRTEs)
- The exercise is Russell Ferrante's, and Greg is learning it on camera, which is the right posture to copy [00:02].
- The structure: "the same pattern over and over in a diatonic scale" [00:39], carried through a circle of chords, in this case a circle of fifths. One voicing shape, unchanged, through the whole chain. All twelve keys, moving up by half step [02:15].
- His own addition is the mirror, reverse harmony [02:46]. Skip it for now, it belongs to A14, and take its axis from the Reverse Harmony video, since the transcript renders it inconsistently here. Keep only his reason: every point of tension is preserved under the flip [05:20]. Become more Musical in your Piano Solos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1rtPDUSBhQ)
- Watch it again with different ears. The one-octave restriction is a consistency device: "it's a lot easier to be musical if you force yourself into a limitation like one octave" [00:35].
- The pattern that closes, "tie a little knot on it" [02:58], is what keeps consistency from becoming repetition.
Learning Bill Evans Solo Technique
- one note held as the goal point of an entire solo, and what to do when the key changes
Learning Herbie Hancock Solo Technique
- one scale used as a consistent color, and superimposed to stay interesting
Voiceleading exercise
- the Russell Ferrante pattern: one voicing shape carried through a chain of chords
Become more Musical in your Piano Solos
- the limitation that produces consistency, revisited with voice-leading in mind
At the piano
Keeping a piece about one idea. You need something to hold constant. There are four candidates and they are not interchangeable.
- A pitch. Evans's C over "Waltz for Debby." The strictest and the most audible to a listener.
- A cell. Three notes and their transformations, from A12.
- A color. One scale or one voicing type, Herbie's minor-major.
- A rhythm. One rhythmic profile applied to changing pitches.
Pick one per piece. Holding two constant at once produces a study, not music. Holding none produces the thing Greg diagnosed in your EP, a run of ideas with no traceable relationship to each other.
Voice-leading as the source of continuity. Play Dm7, G7, Cmaj7 as three root-position stacks. It sounds like three objects. Now play the rootless Evans voicings the source course gives (Lesson 16): F, A, C, E for Dm7; F, A♭, B, E for G7; E, G, B, D for Cmaj7. Trace what happened. The F holds or drops a half step to E. The A descends chromatically through A♭ to G. Nothing leaps. The progression became two or three melodies.
That is the mechanism. The source course puts it as a claim about Evans specifically: "Evans's voicings sound so right not because he selected them from a voicing dictionary but because each voicing is connected to the next through meticulous voice-leading."
Drop-2 as registration, not as a new idea. From A11 you already have drop-2. The point to absorb here is that dropping the second voice from the top changes only where the notes sit. The voice-leading logic is unchanged (Source course, Lesson 16). Dm7 close as F, A, C, D becomes C, F, A, D in drop-2, and the same voice still goes to the same place in the next chord.
Hearing the middle voice. The source course names this as "perhaps the single most valuable exercise in polyphonic listening, because the middle voices are where the real craft of voice-leading is most evident" (Source course, Lesson 4). If you cannot hear the alto in a Bach chorale, you cannot hear your own inner voices while you comp. Ten minutes a day of chorale listening, alto only, fixes this faster than any keyboard exercise.
Counterpoint is next door, and you are not going in yet. Two independent melodies moving against each other is the same subject as this lesson taken one step further, and Greg named it on 9/6 in the same breath as he set it aside: "We could go into some counterpoint stuff, where we have like the way the melodies interact with each other, but there's also a whole study to that that you don't necessarily need."
Read the second half of that sentence as a scheduling decision rather than a dismissal. What you have here, one voice moving by step under another, is the useful edge of counterpoint arriving through the back door, and it is enough to write with. The formal study is Part B Module 3, lessons L12 through L16: species counterpoint over an ostinato, Bach's Inventions set against interlocking guitars, fugue thinking inside a band, rhythmic counterpoint of a riff against the kit, and counterpoint after Bach. It comes after you have a harmonic vocabulary and motifs you can develop, because counterpoint is what you do with two ideas once each of them can survive on its own. Do not start it early. When you get there, this paragraph is the thing it continues from.
The left hand does this work. You asked how much to drill the left hand versus keeping it simple. Greg's answer was both, with basic scales in every key as the floor. Voice-leading is where the left hand stops being a pad. A left hand moving three voices by step is doing composition, which is the thing you said you want to write and also play.
Exercises
1. The Ferrante chain
Do. Play the Ferrante pattern from the video through the full circle-of-fifths chain in C, identical shape on every chord. Then transpose the chain up by half step and repeat, through all twelve keys.
Done when: the pattern is identical on every chord, no voice jumps where a step was available, and you can start the chain in any key without re-deriving the voicing.
2. Nearest-note rule, enforced
Do. Take a tune with a bridge that modulates. Voice the whole form with a hard rule: every voice moves to the nearest available note in the next chord, or holds. No exceptions, even when the result is ugly.
Done when: you can play the full form under the rule, and you can name the two or three places where the rule produced something you would not have chosen and say why.
3. One note, one chorus
Do. "Waltz for Debby," goal note C, every phrase ending on it. At the modulation to A, switch to C♯ and hold it. Return to C when the G minor arrives.
Done when: three consecutive choruses land on C at every phrase ending, and the substitution and the return happen without a gap in the line.
4. One color, one performance
Do. Play "Footprints" using the minor-major scale as your only color source. Then keep the scale and move its root: A♭ minor-major over the C bass, then back.
Done when: you can sustain a full chorus on the one color and still hear the ♭3-against-natural-7 tension deliberately, and the superimposition lands without a seam.
5. Alto only
Do. Pick one Bach chorale. Follow the alto through an entire verse, humming it. Then play the alto alone at the piano. Then play soprano and alto together, hands separate if needed.
Done when: you can hum the alto line of one full chorale from memory.
6. Consistency audit of your own playing
Do. Record three minutes of yourself improvising freely. Listen back with a pen. Every time a new idea arrives that has no traceable relationship to the previous idea, mark the timestamp.
Done when: you have a marked list, and a second recording where the count of unrelated arrivals is at least half of the first.
Compose
Write a thirty-two-bar piece for piano that is about one thing.
Constraints. Choose exactly one element to hold constant across all thirty-two bars: a pitch, a cell, a color, or a rhythm. State which one at the top of the score. Every chord change is voiced so that no voice moves more than a whole step unless you can justify the leap in one sentence written under the staff. The left hand carries at least two independent voices for at least eight of the thirty-two bars. Somewhere in the piece the constant element becomes unavailable, the way Evans's C disappears at the modulation, and you solve it with the nearest available substitute and then return.
Notate in Sibelius. Mark the constant element every time it appears.
Checkpoint
- You can name the four things a piece can hold constant and say which one your piece holds.
- You can play the Ferrante chain in at least four keys with an identical voicing shape.
- You can voice a full standard under the nearest-note rule with no unnecessary leaps.
- You can hold one goal note through a modulation using the nearest available substitute and return on cue.
- You can hum the alto line of a Bach chorale.
- You have thirty-two bars notated, with the constant element marked and every leap justified.
Read
- Source course, Lesson 16 (Voice-Leading in Tonal Music and Jazz). Read the rootless-voicing trace and the drop-2 worked example. The sentence to keep is "voice-leading is the skeleton of harmony," and the warning to keep is that learning voicings as patterns "produces musicians who know voicings but do not understand voice-leading." https://composition.gregspero.com/library/garnett-course.pdf
- Source course, Lesson 4 (Horizontal and Vertical). The three-stage listening progression, Inventions then Sinfonias then fugues, and the claim that the alto is the hardest and most valuable voice to track. Use it to structure Exercise 5.
- Bach, Sinfonia No. 9 in F minor, BWV 795. Named in the source course as the three-voice piece to track the middle voice through. Chromatic subject, rich in half steps, and beautiful enough to live with for a month.