Chords Upside Down - Chord Inversions

Piano Chord Inversions: Root Position, 1st Inversion, 2nd Inversion

Good morning, this is Duane and today I’d like to take a look at piano chord inversions. In fact, I’d like to take you to a page that you can bookmark on the net that shows all the piano chord inversions and explains how they work. All the major and minor piano chords upside down, so I’ll give you the address of this page so you can go to it and bookmark it and always have it to refer to. Chords upside down, of course, are just what it says. You take any chord like the C chord; C, E, and G, turn it upside down. In other words, take the bottom note off the bottom and put it on top. Instead of C, E, G, we have E, G, C. It’s called first inversion of the C chord. The second inversion of the C chord is like that except we take the bottom note there, E, and put it on top. We have the same 3 notes G, C, and E, but upside down.

We have root position, first inversion, and second inversion of any three note chord, of every three note chord. For example, here’s the C minor chord. C, E flat and G, if I put the C on top, that’s the first inversion of the C minor chord. If I put E flat on top, it’s the second inversion of the C minor chord. They’re all C minor chords. In your playing, you want to get used to using all of the inversions because each one gives a little bit of a different sound. Here’s a picture of root position and the first inversion of that chord. The second inversion seems to have gone away in the photo. I’ll have to fix that. Here’s a video that says, “How to turn 48 chords into 144 chords instantly”. There are 12 major chords, 12 minor chords, 12 diminished chords and 12 augmented chords. That makes 48 basic chords. If you invert all 3 of those, 3×48 is 144. You could learn 144 chords without a whole lot of trouble, just by learning how to turn those upside down. This kind of sums up the whole concept of inversion.

If you’re not signed up for our newsletter, by the way, be sure and toggle to the back of the page and plug in your name and email so that you don’t miss any of these little tips. I will put the address of this, the URL of this page right below this video. Just look below the video and click on that link that I put in, and you can go to that page. Then bookmark it so that you can always find it. Okay, thank you. Bye. Click here: https://www.playpiano.com/101-tips/5-inversions.htm

Click on this link to watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vMSovnHZRk&feature=youtu.be

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