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Welcome to GuitarLessons.com. In this lesson I’m going to teach you what an inversion is and how to start using inversions in your playing.
All an inversion is, when you hear someone say, I’m going to play a G-major chord verse inversion, all that means is that one note besides the root note, besides the G note and the G-major chord is going to be the lowest notes that you’re playing in the chord or in the bottom of the chord.
For example if we have a G-major triad, third finger on the fifth fret of your D string, middle finger on the fourth fret of the G string, and your index finger on the third fret of your B string. That’s what we call a root position triad, because the G note of the G chord is lowest note that we’re playing, G right there.
Now if you want to make an inversion out of this, you would need to have either the third or the fifth of the chord being the lowest note that you’re playing. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take our G right here and throw it up to the third fret of our high E string and leave our B note as the lowest note of this chord. So here’s your original chord. Take your third finger off and just lay your index finger over, kind of make a mini bar on the third fret, on the B and E strings and just play the top three strings. You can have your B note in the base or the lowest note of the chord, so you have a first inversion triad.
So that’s all an inversion is. So let’s learn a one, four, five progression using all inversions of just regular triads. So let’s take the inversion we just learned of a G-major chord back there in the base and we’re going to move to a C first inversion triad and all you’re going to do is play the top three strings and just put your index finger on the first fret of your B string and play those top three strings.
That’s a second inversion triad for a C-major chord, because you have your root, a C, an E on the top and G on the bottom. And if you want to go to your five chord, your D chord and do an inversion of that too, all you have to do is slide up this kind of a shape. It’s a regular D chord but just play those three notes. You have a D, and F-sharp and an A. A is the fifth in that chord, D, F#A. So that’s the 2nd inversion triad and we can go back to G first inversion triad to finish it off. So you’re playing just a one, four, five chord progression for these inversions. It will sound just a little bit like this [Demonstration].
So go and take this inversion and start finding them on the fret board and a lot of different keys. Take A and B and C and go through and find the inversions for each one of those chords.
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