You play C, A minor, F, G. It sounds like a demo. Somebody else plays the same four chords and it sounds like music. The difference is almost never the chords. It is which notes move, and how far.
No notation required. Applies to a piano roll as much as to a keyboard.
Move each note the shortest distance you can. That is voice leading. Every other rule is a consequence of it.
Think of a chord not as a shape but as three or four independent singers. Each singer wants to stay where they are, or step to a neighbouring note. Singers do not leap around unless something is going on. When every note in your chord jumps to a new position at once, you have written four simultaneous leaps, and the ear hears four things happening rather than one chord changing.
That is the keyboard demo sound: every chord in root position, the whole hand hopping up and down the keyboard.
C major is C, E, G. A minor is A, C, E. They share C and E. So when you move between them, only one note has to move at all: G steps down to A. One note, one step. If instead you play both chords in root position with the root at the bottom, you have moved all three notes for no reason.
Before writing any chord change, ask which notes the two chords have in common, and leave those exactly where they are.
An inversion is the same chord with a different note at the bottom. C major is C, E, G. Put E at the bottom and it is still C major, but now it can sit next to its neighbours without anybody leaping.
This is the entire mechanism. You are not changing harmony, you are choosing which of the available arrangements of each chord puts its notes nearest to the last one. Most people never touch inversions and then wonder why their progressions sound stiff.
Play C, A minor, F, G, all in root position. Then play them again, but each time keep any shared note where it is and move the rest as little as possible. Same chords, same order. The second version sounds composed and you changed nothing but the arrangement.
Confusing thing about inversions: your bass line does not have to follow them. The bass can play the root of every chord while the upper voices do the smooth thing above it. That gives you a solid harmonic floor and a moving surface at the same time, and it is how most produced music actually works.
So treat the two independently. Bass does the harmony, the upper voices do the voice leading. When you do want the inversion in the bass, that is a deliberate colour: it makes the chord sound lighter and less settled, which is useful mid-phrase and wrong at the end.
When the bass goes down, having the top voice go up makes the whole thing sound bigger and more purposeful. Both moving the same way in parallel sounds thin and mechanical. This is one line to remember and it fixes a lot of dull-sounding progressions on its own.
The classical rule says do not move two voices a fifth apart in the same direction. The reason is real: parallel fifths fuse into a single thick sound and you lose the sense of two independent lines. But it is a rule about a texture, not a law. If you want a fused, powerful, slightly primitive sound, parallel fifths are the way to get it, which is why they are the entire basis of rock guitar. Know what it does and use it when you want it.
Writing chords first and hoping a melody appears is the hard way round. Try this instead.
Doing it in this order means the top line is a line rather than an accident, which is the difference between a progression and a piece.
One more thing, easy to fix and very audible: leave more room between the low notes than between the high ones. Two notes a third apart down at the bottom of the keyboard turn to mud, while the same interval two octaves up is clear and sweet. If a voicing sounds cluttered, the fault is usually in the bottom two notes.
Voice leading is one of those things that is much easier to hear than to read about. Playing with a system that does it automatically, and watching which notes move, teaches it faster than any amount of explanation.
We had to work all of this out properly to build ARGISH, which is a self-playing drone synth. You click a few chords on a wheel and press play, and it scores: voice-leading the pads by these rules, weaving an arpeggio over the top and holding the bass underneath. The reason it does not sound like a keyboard demo is entirely the material on this page.
It is a decent way to hear the principle at work, because you can watch which notes move and which stay while it plays.
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