Voice-Leading

Lots of people use the bottom-first method - in fact, it's what I was taught in school. You might even say that's what I still do, because in arranging a standard for solo guitar the melody is generally fixed; if I'm not changing it, I'm not leading that voice.

But once I shifted from bass-first thinking to melody-first thinking, I found an immediate improvement in my arranging.

I think the improvement came because of the way I attack the problem now... when I was thinking bottom-up with the melody given, I'm looking at the melody and saying "where should the chord change?". I'd answer that question, I'd choose the bass note, and then build the inside voices to form the chord.

Now I look at the melody note, and I'm asking a slightly different question: "is this a chord tone, or a non-harmonic one?" That leads to some subtle changes... in the final arrangment, I've got suspensions/retardations/etc. that I wouldn't have found by building from the bass.

In either case, with a fixed melody - well, it's a fixed melody. That means the first note I'm writing in the arrangment is the bass.

So it's entirely possible that I'm doing it the same way everyone else does, and I just needed twenty years to think about it before I grasped what they were really doing. Lord knows it wouldn't be the first time I was that much slower than the rest of the field!

I think the improvement came because of the way I attack the problem now... when I was thinking bottom-up with the melody given, I'm looking at the melody and saying "where should the chord change?". I'd answer that question, I'd choose the bass note, and then build the inside voices to form the chord.

I think we're probably doing basically the same sort of thing, really Note.

When I start arranging a new song, I start by just playing the melody over and over and over again . . . until I find a bass/rhythm line in my head that I like . .

Then I start with the bass movement and the rhythm to define my chord changes. So where I differe from you, I think, is that I don't look at the melody and ask 'where should the chord change,' instead, I am finding the chord changes because I've already got a bass line and a rhythm going on in my brain that sort of dictates where the chord hits are . . . I rarely am looking for where there should be a chord change . . . but I am often looking for how the heck to get the melody note into the chord in an appropriate voice given the bass motion I've choosen . . .

"Hmmm, ok, I'm in F, and I've run F-Eb-Bb-C-F for the bass line, moving from the 8th fret up to the 3rd fret C and then resolving on the low F, the chord changes are F, F7 (3rd inversion), Bb7, C7, F ... now ... how do I play the low F chord and get that high C into the melody .... hmmmm ..."

I'm willing to bet in practice we work very similarly, though we might think about it slightly differently.