How To Create Inner Chord Voicings

As musicians, we always put a lot of emphasis on how chords progress through a song.  It’s only natural, because it’s natural for chords to move.  But what about when you have more than one beat, bar, or measure when the chord doesn’t change.  It just sort of sits there without progressing to another chord. There’s always a strategy to get things moving, but today I want share with you the concept of how to create inner chord voicings.

Inner chord voicings are tones that are played within the chord without actually changing the chord itself.  At most, it changes the chord quality by adding motion within the chord.

In order to use an inner chord voicing strategy, the chord that you’re playing, you must go beyond a simple triad in root position.  It’s very helpful to include color tones in your chords such as 7ths, flat 7ths and 6ths.  Of course, you’re not limited to just using these tones.

A simple C Major triad

Adding the 6^th creates a 6^th chord

Adding the flat 7^th creates a dominant 7^th chord

Adding the 7^th creates a Major 7^th chordEach one of these tones can be played melodically (one at a time) to create inner chord voicings.

Now that we have a few tones to work with to create inner chord voicings, let’s take a look at them  in the context of a C minor chord.  To change a chord from Major to minor all you have to do is lower the 3^rd (middle note) down a half step. Here, we have what starts out as a C Minor chord that the inner voicings ascend through the 6th, flat 7th, and the major 7th.