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Chord Inversions – Nate Bosch
Hi, I’m Nate Bosch with Pianolessons.com. Today I wanna talk to you a little bit about
inversions. Let’s start with a Cmaj triad, made up of C, E, and G. Now an inversion is
just a different way of playing those same three notes together. So, starting on the root,
this is called the root inversion. Now the first inversion is when you take a C put it on the
top, same three notes but now on the bottom is the E, G, and then C. Now if you do that
again you take the bottom note and you put it on top, we come up with the second
inversion. So here we have the root, the first inversion and the second inversion. Now
that applies to any chord any triad basically with in this keyboard. So if we’re playing to
the key of G for example, now that’s the first inversion of G, well if you take that G and
we put it on top there’s our first inversion B, D, G. Now what would be the second
inversion of G triad, we start on D. So there we have root, first, and second inversion.
Now to familiarize yourself with these inversions, here’s a little exercise you can do.
Start with the root, play the first inversion, the second inversion, and the root, and then
comeback down. Play it slowly at first, back down, and then start to speed it up and get
your fingers use to playing those shapes. Don’t just playing your right hand though, use it
on the left hand as well. There we have our root, first inversion, second inversion and the
root.
Those inversions give a nice—we can call it a flavor, you can call it a texture, you can
call it a different sound to the very same chord. And what they are useful for is when you
start to build chord progressions and you’re putting different chords together, let’s say a
C, an F, a G, and a C. It helps to move the music along smoothly instead of playing just
root. So that’s a C chord, the second inversion of an F chord, the first inversion of the G
chord back to C. Do that on the left hand. So there you have inversions.
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