In this lesson I would like to talk about chord inversions. Chord inversions will make your music come alive in ways that playing “straight” chord voicings won’t allow.

If you remember from my chord structures article I showed you how to build chords from scales. We covered major, minor, dominant, half-diminished (also known as minor 7b5) and fully diminished chords. We also went from triads to 7^th chords, 9^th chords, 11^th chords, and 13^th chords. If you need a refresher, please go back and review that article.

So what exactly is a chord inversion?

To explain this, let’s use the C Major scale once again and use the C Major triad as a staring point:

And let’s also take a look at an F Major triad:

Nothing wrong with these two chords separately. The problem is what happens when you want to play them one after another as part of a chord progression. On your polyphonic instrument of choice (um, your guitar, of course!) play the C triad followed by the F triad and try to make it sound musical. It’s not bad, right? But something tells me you’re thinking it can probably sound better. You may not be able to put your finger on it, but it’s somehow lacking. That’s where inversions come in.

First Inversion

What we’re going to do is manipulate the F major triad. It may not make sense at first, but when we put it all together it should turn on the light bulb over your head.  Okay, so what I want you to do with the F major triad is take the bottom note – in this case the ‘F’ – and move it up an octave. That will give you this:

Same notes, but in a different order it produces a slightly different sound. Play it and see what you think. What we did was “invert” the first note, hence it’s called a chord inversion. For the sake of theoretical reference, we refer to this as “first inversion.” In traditional music, especially church music and organ/piano music, you will sometimes see this written under a chord like this:

6
3

The 6/3 written under the chord tells you that this particular chord is in first inversion. These numbers refer to the position of the notes. Starting at the bottom note of the inverted chord (the ‘A’ in this case), move up 3 steps to get the next note (C), and move up six steps from the bottom note to get the next note (F). Man those music dudes were smart back then!

Second Inversion

So let’s do it again. We’ll take the bottom note again (this time the ‘A’ note) and move it up an octave as well. That gives us the following:

This is “second inversion,” also designated by:

6
4

Try playing this chord voicing and see what you think. Sound good? Aside from the root position chord, this second inversion chord sounds the next strongest of the three. Why is that? I believe it’s because of the interval of a fourth between the bottom two notes. It’s a “grounded” sound, and one that the human ear identifies as stable.

Right. So we have the root position chords and the two inversions. Now let’s go back to the chord progression from C Major to F Major. We’ve identified that it sounds pretty good, but could perhaps sound better. What happens if we play the C Major chord, and then play one of the inversions of the F Major chord? Let’s see:

C Major followed by F major in first inversion gives us:

Play it and see what you think. Again, it sounds pretty good, but in my opinion it could still sound better. So let’s try playing C major followed by F major in second inversion. I’m going to cheat a little bit, however, and also drop the entire F major chord down an octave.

Play it and see how it sounds.

Woah! There’s something about this chord progression using the F Major in second inversion voicing that really connects the two chords. It’s the fact that the ‘C’ note in the bass is common to both chords. We, as humans, feel more comfortable when we can see and hear things that are connected and easily relatable. In this case the ‘C’ note in the bass of both chords provides a stable base that gives the listener a feeling of familiarity.

7th Chords

Cool. So we just did triad inversions. Well guess what? We’re not quite done yet. You can also do the same thing with seventh chords:

Because we have four notes per chord, we can do three inversions per chord. Notice the new inversion numbers.

The same rules apply to 9^th, 11^th, and 13^th chords, but to be honest these chord extensions weren’t used “back in the day” when the traditional inversion numbering system was created. Those notes were considered off-limits for chords, so we don’t really use any numerical designation for them.

That’s about it. It’s very straight forward and simple. What you should do now is take some of your favorite progressions and play with the inversions to see what you can come up with. It will not only expand your capacity to play new things on your instrument, but hopefully it will also stimulate some creativity in your writing.

Enjoy!