What do you call a 9th chord turned upside down?

 Good morning. This is Duane. I would like to talk about the inversions of extended chords. Extended chords, as you know, are chords that go further than one octave. Here’s one octave chord. Extended chord would be like a 9th or 11th or 13th, or any flat 9th, or a combination of a flat 9th and a flat 5th, whatever. Those are extended chords. To invert those is a complex thing. I’ve found that the best way to play a 9th chord or any extended chord is in the second inversion so you can get it all in one hand. Either that or roll the whole chord like this. Root, 5th, 3rd, then play the 9th chord like that, or the 11th chord, or the 13th chord. You play the 13th chord like that, put it on the bottom.

Now, somebody asked me a very good question. What’s the first inversion of a 9th chord? There’s root position, obviously. The 7th is included usually in the 9th, unless it says major 9th; then it would be like that. There’s a 9th chord, or there’s a minor 9th chord. It takes two hands to do it unless you have very large hands. When you get to 11ths, you’re out of luck anyway, so you might as well learn to do it. That’s why I advocate using 2nd inversion, because you can play it like this. Play a low note and then play the whole chord like that. If you want to play it in 1st inversion, it would be like this with the 3rd on the bottom. 1st inversion in classical theory, the 3rd is always on the bottom of the chord. You wouldn’t put the 9th on the bottom of the chord. You could, but then it wouldn’t be called 1st inversion. That would be like a tone cluster. Certainly you can use tone clusters if you want, but don’t call it a 1st inversion. 1st inversion is where the 3rd’s on the bottom. Second inversion is always where the 5th’s on the bottom. 3rd inversion is where the 7th’s on the bottom. Just a little explanation of extended chords when you play them in inversions. Hope that helps. Bye for now. We’ll see you with another video tomorrow.

Good morning. This is Duane. I’d like to walk you through my daily piano tips. It’s a blog that I write most every day. I say write; it’s usually accompanied by a video. I’d just like you to walk through it. If you’re a piano player, you need to know about this because there’s a treasure of stuff in here that goes back for years that you can review from time to time. We’re looking at the face of the blog here. The video here is called How Many Styles You Can Use With One Song, like on Satin Doll. If you want to see what’s current, you click there. That goes through to our current copy. It was Silent Night that I recorded last. The one before that was learning to improvise by simply being playful with the tune. Usually there’s a text. Sometimes like that one there’s no text, but usually there’s a text with the video so you can follow along if you want, or if you don’t get something on the video then you can read about it. This is about fingering, piano fingering and so on.

Look at all the archives here. September 13th, March 12th, May 2011. It goes back to … wow, I’ve been at it for a while, haven’t I? November 2006. Wow, this is 14. I’ve been at it a long time. In any case, you ought to know about that. It’s real easy to find. Right up here I’ll show you the URL. It’s playpiano, all one word, .com. Then put a slash after that, and then WordPress, WordPress. That’s all you need is just playpiano.com/wordpress. I’ll try to make a link for you too so you can just click through it, but if you don’t, just type in playpiano.com/wordpress and you can find that blog. Then you be sure and subscribe to it so that you can get it every time it comes out. Thank you for being with me. I hope you’ll enjoy this. I’m sure you will. Bye for now.

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