Hello, it's Tom Donald from the London Contemporary
School of Piano. And today I'm going to show you how to practice
and how to play chord inversions. The best way for you to practice your chord
inversions. And if you like our work at the London Contemporary
School of Piano, please head on over to our website, contemporaryschoolofpiano.com and
ask for our free resources pack. It is packed with so many useful templates
and handouts and bits of information, based on a lot of the videos you might have seen
on our YouTube channel, that will really help your practice. And if you're really serious about your piano
journey, also inquire about enrolling to our Complete Musician Course, our Complete Musician
Piano Essentials Course. Okay, so let's move on over to our inversions
now. And this often is a real source of difficulty
and confusion for so many people learning piano. For so many of you, you probably understand
the concept of an inversion, you understand that this is a C Major as a root chord. And this is a C major in first inversion. And this is a C major in second inversion. And for many of you, you probably are able
to do this with many of your chords. Just doing this in D major now. And I'm doing this on an E flat major, or
an F major. But where we run into difficulties with our
inversion playing is integrating it into a piece of music, being able to look at a lead
sheet, a collection of chords, and effectively use inversions and voicings. So today, I'm going to break it down and make
it simple for you to understand. But not only I'm going to make it simple for
you to understand, I'm actually going to do something far more important than that. You see, the problem with music theory is
you can study theory all day, we can talk about root chords, first inversion, second
inversion for all day. And yet, our fingers might still not know
how to do it. Essentially playing the piano is a physical
activity, it is an activity where we use our body where we use our hands where we use our
fingers and our arms. And this is something we have to train into
our muscle memory. So today I'm going to show you how to train
inversions into your muscle memory. And that's what's going to be so powerful
about this exercise. So let's begin. Here we have a lead sheet. And before I talk about my little arrows and
mock ups I've done on this lead sheet, let me talk a little bit about a simple principle
that we can apply to our piano playing. So if you have two chords, here's a really
interesting relationship. If you let's say have a C major chord, and
then it moves to an F major chord, you'll notice those two chords are a perfect fourth
interval apart, the C to an F. Same thing, if I were playing a D minor to a G, or an
E minor to an A minor. All of those chords are a perfect fourth apart. So here's something you can bear in mind. If you ever come across two chords, like a
C major to an F major, or a D minor to a G major, you literally only have to lift the
top two notes. And you have visited the chord that is a perfect
fourth apart. So that's a C major to an F major. And this is something we can immediately train
our fingers to do, C major to F major. And I might keep my bass note on the C and
the F. That's fine that that tells us what the chord is. But as I practice these chords in the right
hand, I now have a simple template for finding chords that are a fourth apart. The first chords are root chords. And the second one is an inversion. In this case, it's in the second inversion,
but we don't really think of it that way. We think of it as C major. Now I lift the top two notes, and I land on
an F major. So this relationship can be applied all across
the keyboard. What about a D minor to a G major. There you go, I've done the same thing. I've lifted the top two notes, and I'm on
my G major. E minor to an A minor. And I've done the same thing. I've lifted the top two notes. And of course, irrespective of whether the
chord is major or minor, this formula will always work. The only thing is you have to make sure you
know the notes of your chord. So this is a D major to a G major. And again, the same principle applies I just
lifted the top two notes. So if the chord is a perfect fourth apart,
all I have to do is lift the top two notes. So here's the progression, which explores
that - C major to F major, D minor to G major, E minor to A minor. And then something else happens at the end,
which we'll talk about. So let's play through this progression together. C major - F major, D minor - G major, E minor
- A minor, F major, C major. So notice I did something different here at
the end, the F major to C Major has a different relationship, it's going a fourth down. So here's the F major. Here's the C major. So this is another relationship with our chords. And that relationship is, if the chords are
going down a fourth interval, let's say F major to C major, or G major to D minor, or
A minor to E minor, all I have to do in this case, is the opposite, drop the bottom two
notes, F major, C major. And that's what explains those last two chords
in this progression here, the F major, drop the bottom two notes, and I am on the C major. So this is what I call finger language, lift
the top two notes, drop the bottom two notes. It's the language our fingers can recognise
because it's a physical instruction that we're giving our fingers. If I were to say to root position C major,
go into a second inversion F major, that means absolutely nothing to our fingers won't help
your fingers at all. And it will just take you forever to find
the inversion. And that's the problem that most of you are
probably having right now. And I've even mocked it up just by putting
these little arrows. I mean, it's just shorthand, but it just gives
me an idea of how to plan my inversions. And it's really important when you're doing
this for the first time, don't try and overuse the inversions. I'm studying as a root chord - inversion,
root chord - inversion, root chord - inversion, root chord - inversion. That's just such a helpful way to do it. So let's look at this next progression now. So we now have, we're now exploring chords
that are a perfect fourth down, or you could say a perfect fifth up. But for the sake of the exercise, is C major
to G major is a perfect fourth going down just like the A minor to the E minor is perfect
fourth going down, F major - C major, again, a perfect fourth going down. So when a perfect fourth is going down with
the chord change, we can just simply drop the bottom two notes. Let's do that. Now here we have two records in a row, just
because the chords are right next to each other. Let's do that again. By the way, can you guess this piece of music? What is this chord progression? Have you heard it somewhere before, if you
haven't, put in the chat, let me know what it is. So that's a really good start to inversions. By the way, it's not the only inversions I
could have used for this. But it's a good starting point to training
our fingers to more intuitively find inversions. Now, if you're looking at a lead sheet and
ever getting overwhelmed by the amount of inversions that you might need to use and
how to plan it, I'll give you a very powerful suggestion. And that's think in groups of two. You see if I've got a C major to a G major,
I can just plan that by going okay, root chord. And where's my inversion? Okay, well, I just need to drop the bottom
two notes, because it's a fourth going down. So just by looking for those patterns, I can
decide my chords in groups of two. And then that just makes the whole exercise
so much more approachable and accessible. And actually, this is something our fingers
can understand. And what starts to happen, especially if you
practice exercises like this, your fingers start to memorise the positions, and it starts
to happen automatically when you look at lead sheets. That's what you're aiming to achieve with
this. So here's another progression and another
pattern. Let's say we have a C major to an A minor. So that's going down a third interval, literally
going down two steps. C major - A minor, E minor - C major, that's
going down two steps as well, F major -D minor, that's going down two steps, G major - D minor,
that's two steps as well, A minor - F major. So when we see this going down to steps, there's
just one simple thing we can do, we just have to literally lift the top note. And we have found a really lovely path to
that A minor from the C major. And the same applies from the E minor to the
C major. And it's such a beautiful voicing, and I haven't
even had the chance to talk about how the smoothness of inversions make our chord sounds
so much more sophisticated. I like to think of inversions as a choir,
you imagine you've got three singers going. Now, if we told all those singers to just
go down two steps, to the A minor, something would be a little predictable about that or
a little obvious about that sort of chord change. But if we ask those two lower singers to stay
on the same note and we just lift the top note, with the top singers going up, we get
a really lovely, elegant change. You can hear a choir or string players in
an orchestra doing this, composers are doing this all the time in their arrangements. You see, by learning to play inversions, you're
actually learning a deeper skill. And it is the skill and the art of arrangement,
the arrangement of your chords. So let's play through this progression, then:
C major, A minor, E minor, C major, F major, D minor, G major, E minor, A minor, F major,
G major, and we lift the top two notes and we're on C major. So finally, let's try this in a few different
keys and scales. We don't just have to practice this in C major
after all, these techniques apply to any key universally across the keyboard. So let's say I'm going from an E flat major
to an A flat major, it would look like this. What about an E flat major to B flat major? It would look like this and dropping the bottom
two notes. What about an E flat major to a C minor? I would just lift the top note only. I could do this in other keys. What about D major, a D major to a G major? I would just lift the top two notes. What about the D major to an A major? I would just drop the bottom two notes. And what about a D major to a B minor? We'll just lift the top note. Regardless of what key you're practising this
in, the most important thing you need to know first are the notes of your chord. So you are finding the notes accurately, and
then just explore that relationship of chords in groups of two. And once you train this into your fingers,
playing inversions will start to become more intuitive. I hope you found today's tutorial an eye opener
for playing inversions. And again, if you'd like to take advantage
of our free resources, head on over to our website contemporaryschoolofpiano.com, but
if you are a little bit extra serious now, this year about making some big strides in
your piano journey, I have curated a course, it is accumulation of my 15 to 20 years of
research and development in the field of specialist piano education. And I have managed to synthesise that into
eight truly powerful modules. And this is my Complete Musician Piano Essentials
Course. It doesn't matter what level you're up to,
whether you're a beginner, whether you're a restarter for piano, or you stopped for
many years and you're starting again, whether you're a hobbyist, whether you're a teacher,
whether you're a professional, I can guarantee you these eight modules that I've put together,
I think synthesise some of the most key elements to becoming freer at the piano and having
a more closer musical relationship with playing the piano and taking away the tension and
just freeing yourself up and becoming a complete musician. So if you'd like to go on that journey with
me, find out more information about our enrollment, and you can email us or get in touch with
us again, through our website, contemporaryschoolofpiano.com. I hope you found our inversions video useful. Start pulling out some sheet music and some
scores. Try it with some triads. Let us know in the comments below if you've
got any questions about fingering or anything, and I look forward to speaking with you soon. Thank you very much. Bye bye
