Jumping off after our previous two articles on Voice Leading with Elixir, and Algorithmically Fingering Guitar Chords with Elixir, we’re left with a series of chord voicings ranked according to how well they voice lead from our starting chord, and the set of all possible fingerings for each of these voicings.

Given that our starting chord has a known fingering, which fingering of each of these “best” voicings is the “easiest” to play after our starting chord?

This is an interesting question, and gives us the opportunity to flex our algorithmic muscles again. This time we’ll be basing our solution on a modified version of the Levenshtein distance algorithm for finding the “edit distance” between two strings.