How Inversions and Slash Chords Create Better Progressions [MUSIC THEORY]

hey I'm Jake Lizzio and in this video we're gonna learn pretty much everything you want to know about chord inversions and slash chord notation this is a topic that's often taught early on in music theory classes but I don't find it very helpful until you've got a good grasp of writing diatonic chord progressions in major and minor so if you're not familiar with those concepts check the video description below where I've linked to two videos that describe that having a good grasp of inverted chords is really gonna free you up to write way more interesting melodic and moving chord progressions at the end of this video we're gonna examine a few different examples of where we've heard these kind of things used to really great effect but for the first half of the lesson we really need to focus on what our inverted chords how do we read them and understand them and how can we write them as well to get started I'm just gonna pick the key of a major and we're just gonna build an a major triad or an a major chord that's just the first note of the a major scale the third note and the fifth note so that would be the notes a C sharp and E and if I play those three notes at the same time I will get an a major chord as long as a is on the bass as long as a is the lowest note that's ringing out so I can play those notes in this order I could play a II a C sharp and E and we'd still call that an a major chord and it's I can play those notes in any order as long as a is on the base so here's another version of an a major chord here's another version of an a major chord here's another version of an a major game those are all a chords because they contain the notes a C sharp and E and a is on the bass now a chord in first inversion means that instead of our root being our base note our third is now our base note so our third was c-sharp and if I make that the lowest note of an a chord like this I have an a chord in first inversion and once again I can rearrange the order of these notes to get different kinds of a in its first inversion but that's all that a first inverted chord is it means the third is now played on the bass and to notate this there's a traditional way to notate a chord in first inversion we'd write an a and then we would followed up the numbers six and three what that's telling us is it's telling us the distances between our notes now if we look at my a chord now we'll see that c-sharp is my new bass note and the distance from that bass note to the next note is a minor third that's what the three represents the distance from my bass note to the next note after that is a minor sixth that's what the six represents so when you see six three it's really just describing the intervals there but you just want to memorize that six three means a chord in its first inversion that means the third is now being played on the bass now I'll be honest I really don't like that notation it's descriptive but it's kind of old and it's kind of confusing as well to make matters worse a lot of composers will just notate this with a giant number six instead and people might read that and think that they're talking about a sixth chord so I don't really prefer to use this notation but it is important to know it because it does pop up quite a bit what I would rather do to describe what we just saw is write the chord as a slash c-sharp any time you see a slash chord in music it just means that hey we've replaced our bass note a is supposed to have a on the base but the slash is telling us that we've replaced that bass note with the c-sharp so when I see a chord like this I would much rather write it as an a slash C sharp than a 6 3 now if we take a look at that same chord in second inversion it just means that our fifth is now being played on the bass so we could take a look at those same chords we have now and then an end and a c-sharp and then another e this would be an a and its second inversion I would just call it a /e I think that's the much easier way to describe this chord but the traditional way to notate it would be an A and six four and once again that's describing the intervals here if you look at my new bass note which is e you'll notice the distance between E and a is a perfect fourth that's what the four represents the distance between E and C sharp is a major sixth and that's what the six represents so really this is all you got to memorize the traditional way to notate this is that a chord in first inversion is called a 6 3 chord and it has the 3rd on the base a chord in its second inversion is a 6 4 chord and it has the fifth on the base now everything we just learned applies identically to minor chords so if I look at an a minor chord I have an a and a C and so here's an a minor in root position I could put it into its first inversion just by adding that C onto the base now I'm playing an a slash an a minor slash C or an a minor 6 3 once again if I put e on the base I could just let the low open e ring out when I play this and I'd have an a minor / E or an a minor 6 4 so why should we care about this stuff how is it going to help us write better chord progressions well to answer that I just want to demonstrate a very simple example using just three different chords if I go from my 1 chord in a which is a to my 5 chord which is e to my 6th chord which is f sharp minor we have a simple little chord progression that just sounds nice to the ear 1 5 6 just pay close attention to what the base is doing during that chord progression on the a chord the bass plays an a on the E chord the bass plays at E on f-sharp minor the bass plays an f-sharp so our bass has this big jump from a down to e and then up to F sharp a sharp now that sounds fine but we could completely recraft that bass line into something less jumpy and is something a little smoother we could have it descend all the way down to f-sharp just by introducing some inverted chords so here's my a chord again but instead of playing E with E on the bass I'm gonna play E with G sharp on the bass instead and it gives me this motion from a major to e / G sharp and did you hear my bass now going from A to G sharp to F sharp minor I think that sounds I'm not gonna say better but it's different and there's gonna be instances where you would rather do something like that where the bass is slowly falling as opposed to this bass movement that's jumping up and down I think for something like a love song where you're trying to kind of create this feeling of actually falling in love or you're doing something that has that that descending effect an inverted chord is gonna save you there from that wild jumpy bass movement and just for reference this chord progression where we have our our tonic and then we have our inverted five chord and then we go to our sixth chord in root position you're going to see this everywhere off the top of my head the first few chords of American Pie by Don MacLean is a G chord that's the one and then does a D / f-sharp that's an inverted five and then it goes to the six corner also Freebird is starts off with a g d f-sharp / f-sharp and then e minor so you're gonna see that exact movement quite a bit and you should be able to recognize now that that movement that popular chord progression is created just through the clever use of a single major chord in first inversion now let's take a look at some deeper and more interesting uses of these inverted chords in action and I'm gonna go over three different examples by three prolific songwriters the first example I want to take a look at is from George Harrison's something I did do an entire analysis on just this song so check out that video if you like what you're hearing here but I really just want to focus on this small little section of chords that happens during our happier major chorus sections those are in the key of a major and they train change from the one chord and a major to the 3 chord C sharp minor now normally the bass movement there would move up that major third we have a then up to C sharp minor instead though they play that C sharp minor in its second inversion that means my new bass note is G sharp and that means my bass movement is now falling down just a half step so it's gonna go from a - g-sharp on the base the next chord is just the sixth chord F sharp minor in root position and then they go back to the tonic chord a but once again that is flipped into second inversion so the fifth is on now if you look at the base note that we just the base notes in that chord progression you'll notice they go from A to G sharp to F sharp - we've got a nice descending chord progression all the way through there that sounds really nice even though our chords are changing all over the place and if you compare the two side-by-side here are the notes in root position a major a c-sharp then f-sharp now compare that base movement to a she sharp then I think it's a you know completely different effect like I said I don't want to say better or worse but I think in that instance I would much rather hear it in that arrangement as opposed to just those big jumpy base movements now for me personally the first time I really grew to appreciate inverted chords is when I learned Dream Theater's regression is the acoustic track that starts off their album scenes from a memory and it's in the key of D it starts off on a D major chord then it plays a D slash F sharp it's a D in first inversion straight into a GE which is the four chord and then back to de amenities slash C sharp which isn't a major chord at first inversion but you could think of it as a major seventh chord that's being inverted then straight to the sixth chord E minor and then that bass note from the minor just turns into an a so it's a B minor smashed head and once again you could think of this as a minor seven chord that has been inverted but I'm just gonna call it the B minor 7 or a B minor /k then straight to an e / g sharp so in keyboard first inversion and we can think of that as the five of our five it's a secondary dominant chord to take us to a major and a major will help us resolve that so I think that's a really clever use of chords you got some nice you know stuff in there you got a secondary dominant you've got some nice base movement and if you listen to this chord progression without those bass movements it's you know in my opinion those base movements are really the only pages in that chord progression works without it you just you know diatonic for progression up until that surprise emajor so I think by hiding in that basement then you're getting a lot more interest out of that simple chord progression sharp straight too back to Charmian minor B minor /a nice flash g-sharp and then asus4 for our last example I won't fault you if you don't recognize it I had written a song a few years back called generations and I posted it here on the channel it's an instrumental prog rock song and the verse sections all consist of some really simple chords that have just been enhanced through the use of slash chords adding in new chords to the base and taking chord inversions and kind of helping create a little bit more interesting movement there on the bass so the chord progression at its most basic level is just a D and then a D slash C sharp and then a C major and then a G major but I ended up turning that into was a D sus 2 and then a d sus 2 / C sharp and then a C and then a G / B and if you look at the bass movement there you'll notice that the bass is just descending that half step at a time like that and to make this chord progression more interesting I added an even more bass movement just on its own to help that bass kind of you know really have its own role even as a guitar player I wanted to have a prominent bass movement so it turned into this the / C sharp to C major than G over B and then I finally bring in the genie after that it just goes back to a DS us - but it goes straight to a B minor 7 and then a B flat with a Adam sharp 11 for some nice try Tony goodness [Music] now if you're curious where those chords come from you may have recognized they're not all in the key of C then you're gonna definitely want to check out my lessons on borrowed chords because in my opinion if you understand how to write a diatonic chord progression if you understand borrowed chords if you understand secondary dominant chords and you understand chord inversions you are basically prepared to write any chord progression that to me are the four huge pillars of progression writing and if you you know if you're struggling with any one of those topics right now I highly suggest you go back over those topics and master them because to me I think you're you're almost untouchable as a composer if you have a really good grasp of these four concepts combine them together and you can just you will have an infinite supply of an interesting unique and recognizable chord progressions now before we close things out there's a few things we got to talk about first this notation that we talked about earlier the one I said I didn't like with the six three and the six four that's called figure to base and you can actually go even more detail in that there's where there's figured bass notation for seventh chords and minor seventh chords so you can if you do like that notation and you're interested in you know and learning that definitely pursue that on your own there's plenty of information there out on the Internet but I will say that it's going to be pretty impractical to most musicians who are just guitar players it's a much more practical you know notation to learn if you're going to be writing out scores or if you're planning on enlisting in some college-level music theory classes that's a pretty important topic to learn I also really want to encourage people to use slash chord notation it's so easy when I say something like a slash C sharp it instantly tells us what it is we don't have to count intervals or remember which one is first inversion which one a second inversion the only thing is is when you use slash chords you can sometimes miss name accord like if I took the chord a slash f-sharp well the the chord a slash f-sharp I look at all those notes in I basically get the notes of an f-sharp minor 7th chord so should you call it an f-sharp minor 7 or should you call it an A / f-sharp there's actually times where it would make more sense to call it an A / f-sharp like let's say I was doing an A major and then a / T sharp and then an a /kr and then a / it's very similar to the George Harrison thing we heard I would rather call that an A / f-sharp because it kind of tells us what's going on we have an a major triad that's static it's unchanged and then underneath that our base note is moving once at a time you could notate that as a major and then a slash B sharp and then call it an f-sharp minor 7 but to me it doesn't describe the music as well so there's many times when you're dealing with slash chords where a chord can literally have two different names it's also worth noting that if we rearrange those same notes of an f-sharp minor 7 that we get the notes of an a 6 chord that's an AE triad with a natural 6 dad so you know we've got three different ways to call that same that same chord could have three potential names and a good composer just picks the name that best describes what's going on so I hope this video helps you out and if it did you're gonna have to thank my awesome patreon supporters for making it possible they've been supporting this channel and in exchange I post them some PDFs and occasional mp3s and special videos if you'd like to join them you can there's links below in the description but if you don't like to do that you can just like subscribe and comment if you'd like to help me out thanks for watching and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 232,313

Keywords: chord progressions, chord inversions, inverted chords, first inversion, slash chords, 63 chords, 64 chords, figured bass, writing chord progressions, writing for guitar, understanding music theory, music theory lesson, music theory guitar, chord theory, guitar chords, guitar theory, using chord inversions, writing with chord inversions, writing with inverted chords, writing inverted chords, how to use inversions, how to use chord inversions, how to use inverted chords

Id: LFN-eKved_8

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2020