An Intensive Journey to Demystifying the Fretboard - Part 6

If you haven’t read yet, make sure to check the previous segment of the series:
Part 5 - Voice Leading for Classical Guitar

Three-note voicings, like the triads, are a good starting point to work on polyphonic concepts for guitar as they are more comfortable to play and allow more freedom of movement than four-note voicings without losing any essential elements.

Hearing the Voices

The first step towards understanding polyphony is to be able to hear the voices individually and be able to create melodic lines on each one of them.

Singing is the most direct way that we experience sound as it involves the least amount of translation. Therefore it is the most efficient way to internalise sounds and understand all the different elements that create a musical experience. Even if you don't consider yourself a singer - I certainly don't think myself as one - try to sing as much as you can. Top melodies, inner voices, low voices, rhythms, everything!

Formulae

Start with a simple progression and add melodic lines independetly to the top, middle, and low voices.

Make sure that the melodies don't overlap with the other voices because:

Voices may lose their individuality.
Due to the nature of the guitar, it will probably mean that you will have to interrupt one of the other voices.

Writing Melodies

For this example, I will use the example from the lesson on voice leading. The combination of open and close voicings allows for greater flexibility of the melodic notes.

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Adding a melodic line to the soprano is the obvious choice, as we are used and expect to hear music with the melody on the top voice.

To keep things simple, I only used diatonic notes with a constant eight-note value to connect the target tones. Target tones are all the important notes that are part of the harmonies at each instant, the rest of the notes are scale tones in the Key of G Major.

In a similar fashion, I created a melody for the bass.

The low part is almost as intuitive to play and hear as the top one.

Finaly, let’s hear a melody on the tenor/alto.

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The middle voice is a little trickier, both in writing and in playing, as sometimes there is not enough space for an interesting melody and can easily disturb one of the outer voices. Nevertheless, adding a melody to the middle voice is equally satisfying and even more so rewarding.

Paying Attention

A couple of technical aspects that you need to be consious of when you are practising melodic lines on three voices:

Make sure that you let all the tones ring their actual values. As much as you can.
Make sure that you play the two harmonic voices a little softer to let the one with the melody stand out.

Playing all the voices and melodies individually a few times will assist you in understanding them better before you put the whole arrangement together.

Relishing Polyphony

If this is not enough for you, after practising all melodies individually, an extra step to stimulate the progression and elicit polyphony is to tweak the rhythms and combine melodic lines in all voices.