Chord Inversions

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and in this lesson we're going to learn about a very powerful musical tool
that allows you to manipulate chords in all kinds of ways.
It's called chord inversions, and understanding them is critical for any composer, musician, or pianist, especially as we're getting to more advanced music.
Let's come to the piano to check out how chord inversions work.
Let's say we wanted to play the chord progression I in the key of C, so this is our I chord,
and then we wanted to play a IV chord next, which would be right here in the key of C or F major chord.
Now you can see that that's a bit of a jump to get all the way from here to here.
That would be what's called not smooth voice leading. If you can imagine that each of these notes is a different voice, this voice would have to go:
A pretty big jump up, but there's another way to do that IV chord using inversions.
We've mentioned this occasionally, that you can take this C,
and place it down here, and it's still the same chord.
This is also an F major chord, it's just inverted,
and this makes it much smoother voice leaning. Now this voice just has to go:
And this middle voice only has to go up a step, whereas before everyone was jumping up a fourth.
That's called smooth voice leading. So it's the same chord progression, I chord, IV chord,
but now with smooth voice leading thanks to inversions.
Let's look at another example. What if we wanted to play the chord progression I to a vi chord? So here's our I chord again in the key of C major
and then we've learned recently that the vi chord, well, we could jump way up here. That would be very
unsmooth voice leading,
but we could go down here, which is better. Everyone just had to skip down a third, boom,
but there's an even better way to do it using inversions.
Instead of skipping down a third, what if we inverted the chord this way? Taking the bottom note A, which is the root of the chord,
flipping it up an octave to here.
This also is a vi chord. It's an inverted vi chord,
because we still have an A, a C, and an E,
but it's inverted, and you'll notice now all we have to do to get from the I chord
to the vi chord is just move that one note up a step. These two voices don't even have to change at all.
So that's very smooth voice leading to get from I to vi.
Now let's review some terminology.
In a triad, which is a chord built on thirds like this,
each note has a name. We call this the root of the chord.
It's the root, because it's the note that the triad is built on.
So C is the root, E is the third of the chord, and G is called the fifth of the chord.
Now, even if we inverted this chord and put the C up here,
C is still the root. It's like we took the tree and flipped it upside down with now the roots up in the sky.
It's kind of a silly analogy, but even if you invert a chord,
this is still considered the root.
So now we have the root on top. That's why it's called an inversion. To invert something is just to flip it or to be upside down.
We still have the third here, and the fifth of the chord down here at the bottom now.
Well the third's at the bottom, and the fifth in the middle, you could say.
So let's review the terms. Say them out loud with me as we point. Point on your screen with me. Root, say it out loud with me, root third fifth.
Now when a chord has the root on the bottom, we call that root position.
So this is a C major chord in root position, we could say.
Now if we invert the chord and take the root and put it on top,
so now the third is on the bottom like this, it's still a C major chord, but we call it first inversion.
So repeat after me. C major 1st inversion.
Good, remember we had root position C major.
Now C major 1st inversion.
Now we can also take the third of the chord and place it on top.
So now we have the fifth on the bottom, the root in the middle, and the third on top.
It's still a C E G, it's still a C major chord, but now we call this 2nd inversion.
So repeat after me: C major 2nd inversion.
Good, now what would happen if we invert the chord one more time? What if we took the fifth which is this G, and place it up here?
You should recognize this. We're back to root position. So repeat after me: C major root position.
See how we did that? Now let's invert it back down. We're going to take the G, put it on the bottom, now we're in C major 2nd inversion.
We can take the third, put it on the bottom. Now we're back in 1st inversion C major still,
and then back C down to C, we're back to root position.
every single one of those chords we just saw they were all C major chords just using different inversions.
Now let's try to play them.
It's very important as you're practicing these inversions that you follow the fingering correctly. Trust me that these fingerin ...