Voicing on the Guitar: Melodies, Textures, Chords

Whether it is an individual chord or the texture of an entire passage – accompanied melody, counterpoint, chorale, and so on – there are endless ways of balancing the sounds, each with its own expressive effect.

Here’s a video talk I put together for the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society during the lockdown of 2020. My aim was to offer a toolkit of useful voicings, with examples from the repertoire, and suggest studies and exercises to help you develop your skills. Examples come from works by Narvaez, Bach, Sor, Aguado, Brouwer, and Britten.

We put much more on the fundamentals of right-hand touch, including to a discussion of voicing, in chapter 2 of Guitar, ‘Touch, Sound and Voice’. And there’s more discussion of the Brouwer Simple Studies in chapter 9, ‘Player-Composers’ (pp. 245–9).