Guitar Mastery: Unlocking Voice Leading for Fluid Improvisation

[Intro Music]

Hey everyone, I want to talk about voice leading today. I think voice leading is something that really changed my playing forever, and I want to share some ideas with you. That was just an improvisation here, inspired by Bach—I’ve been working on a lot of his stuff lately.

I’ve noticed a big part of students coming to me saying, “Hey, there’s this chord progression I’ve been jamming on, and I just don’t get it. How do I improvise on it?” It always comes back to leading through changes, to the basic stuff of being able to voice lead through the changes.

For example, if you have a progression like E major, C# minor, F# minor, and perhaps a D# diminished chord—so a 1-6-2-7 progression, which is a variation of the 1-6-2-5, but you get the sound of it. It’s very popular.

That’s a five of six—that’s for later, maybe. The first thing I say is, “Okay, can you improvise for me a little bit?” A lot of the time, some of my students may know the scale and might play something like:

[Music]

You know, which is okay, I mean, it’s not bad if you have a good sense of melody for that. But if you really want to dictate the changes and also become very creative with stuff, a good thing you can do is just start very basically by voice leading the chords.

Let’s break it down. We have an E major, which is the first degree, a nice relative minor, C# minor chord, a nice second degree, F# minor, which gives us some longing to go to the scale, but not yet because we have the seventh degree here, which really brings us back home.

So, what you’re going to do is take a set of strings and explore voice leading those chords. E major is right here in the first inversion with E on top. Now, with a very subtle movement, just changing one note, I have a second inversion of a C# minor, which is our second chord. Then, F# minor—see this F# right here? You get a first inversion of that. And then D# diminished, right here. And that’s it. Now you have another way of playing that progression.

So, just put together:

[Music]

Now I’m in this E major, so I have another round to go. From now, I’m just focusing on hitting those triads because I want to have very wide control over my progression. This is just a very basic one, which is great, by the way. Practicing common and basic progressions will really get you far with your understanding on the fretboard.

So, again, we have E major, this time in the second inversion, into a nice C# minor right here. Same chords—this is a second inversion of that, and then D# diminished, to the beautiful diminished sound. And I’m back to my E. Just putting that together, you’re already getting some beautiful sounds out of that progression.

[Music]

Next step—right? And you can imagine how this stuff will eventually become very melodic solos. Now, the next step after doing something like that—which is funny to say, but by saying that, so many people can start overlooking the steps. I would actually say, obsess over that step more than you obsess over just noodling and trying to hope for good melodies to come. Because by doing that, you’re really learning to hear the different voices that are involved whenever switching to another chord.

The next step is to take that high note here and move it down an octave to form a new set of strings. Now you have the same E major, just as a root position. You keep doing that, and you form these arpeggios, right? And that’s how you get into stuff like:

[Music]

These types of arpeggios. You see, it’s the same exact chord by taking the high notes and pushing them down, and you form the next set. That’s how you start coming up with these ideas. Then F# minor—same idea.

[Music]

So, you see, there are two ways to go about learning the guitar. There’s a very confusing way of trying to figure out everything by yourself, as if you’re the first person ever to discover how to learn music on the guitar. Which isn’t true. It’s a long way, it’s frustrating, and a lot of the time, people get confused, feel stuck, and eventually either stop playing or stop developing. That can make them feel stuck in a rut for decades.

I really had a dream of sharing all the different lessons I learned through my journey to get unstuck. My dream was to have an ideal platform where people could join me in discovering the guitar on a deep level of harmony and melody, so they could be very creative and express themselves freely on the instrument. I worked very hard for three or four years and came up with a beautiful, step-by-step journey that you can experience on my website, wiessguitar.com.

Now I’m going to show it to you.

[Course Overview]

Alright, jumping into the course area, we have “Galactic Mod Guitar 1, 2, and 3,” “Melodic Minor 51,” “Galactic Jazz Licks,” and “Diminished and Workouts,” all different levels. I say if you join, just take it one step at a time. It’s a very comprehensive program—I wish we had it back in the day. Let’s go jump into the foundations here so I can show you some of it.

You have a progress bar, so you can always track your progress. I always like to make sure there’s a nice introduction video telling the story, the approach, and some tips for practicing. There are some goodies over here that you’ll see when you check it out, and then you have the actual course content. Each of the courses I just showed you has modules within them—about six to seven modules, with some surprises and bonuses, usually PDFs of my popular YouTube videos. I like putting those there.

When you enter the Triads, for example, the first module here, you see you can track your progress. You can mark this module as complete if you feel like it. If you need any help, I’m always here—you just click “Need Help,” write me a message, and I’ll make sure to reply.

I always like to include some written word in my modules to make sure you have everything you need. I include on-screen tabs and notation, and the ability to speed up or slow down all of the materials. The examples are recorded with high-quality professional audio. Of course, I always make sure within each of the modules to include PDFs with different explanations, from more theoretical explanations to actual practice. And we’re going to play a lot—there’s a lot of playing in all the courses, a lot of practicing together with me, and understanding the different concepts, making sure all the fundamentals are in place so you’re not missing anything. And I mean anything.

Here’s an example of a PDF that you can print out or put on your tablet or iPad. You can navigate right back to the course area.

I just wanted to show you around, and I hope to see you there! It’s wiseguitar.com—that’s the website, so you can check that out. Here’s the whole series right there. If you need even more, you can take the tour on my website and check it out.

That’s it, everyone! If you want to master the fundamentals, unleash your creativity, and acquire the language, check out “Galactic Mod Guitar.” The link to do that is in the description of this video, and I hope to see you inside the course.

Thanks for tuning in!