Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Question regarding inversions

For sure.

I just do not think of those configurations as inversions.

I think of them as voicings.

Thanks for the reference, Earl. It's certainly interesting, but I'll stick with the leadsheet style alphanumeric chords and slash to specify the inversion. It saves space on the paper because you don't need the whole bass staff.

I suppose that inversions have all kinds of voicings. Nonetheless, a named inversion refers to which note is on the bottom. If it were restricted to closed chords with exactly three notes, then you'd be talking about something you don't see that often in music, and what you do see in music would not have a name. That wouldn't make sense.

It's interesting to study, to understand where our concept of chord charts and chord progressions come from, but it's not used very often anymore. I studied it in college and have yet to come across it since. I've heard that some orchestra players may make notes like that to indicate which part of the chord they are playing, giving their single note some context.

Yup. Just noticed another big problem with it: Four note chords. "Middle" doesn't work with them. Like would it be C7/E or C7/G?

Just a thought about slash chords. I've never seen them used in any context other than pop or jazz lead sheets (are they routinely used in another setting?). Here, their use doesn't convey any information at all about what is happening in the RH regarding inversion; this is always a matter of discretion and context (voice leading etc.). So C7/E would mean specifically an E in the bass register, very commonly the LH playing the sole root note, and any one of the 4 possible inversions of C7 in the RH - in fact many more than 4 configurations if a note is omitted, a colouration like the 9th is added, or more intricately, the LH is spanning both the bass note and a contributing note to the RH voicing.

Chord symbols are always hard put to describe the complete picture even when we try and refine them with terms like 1st, 2nd inversion, middle....

The middle inversion is how I used to play left hand chords on an organ years ago!

Sure, and when we want to specify the complete picture precisely, we use a little more paper and write it out in grand staff. It's a tradeoff. A lot of the time, lead sheets are OK.

Lead sheets are fine and slash chords are both compact and informative but they convey no information at all about inversion….the topic of this thread.

OK, now I'm confused. If I know that the chord is C7 and that the lowest note is E (C7/E), isn't that the same thing as knowing that it's 1st. inversion?

Here's two chords from a typical lead sheet.

D, E9/B

You'd be expected to play those with both hands. How will you voice them?

Of course there are lots of ways to do it, depending on the context of the melody and the rest of the chords.

D in root position could be D3 - F#3 - A3. Or you could use D3 - A3 - F#4. D must be the lowest note, and the others must be F# and A.

E9/B could be B2 - D3 - F#3 - E4 - G#4. In this case, B must be the lowest, and the others are E, G#, D, and F#. They can go anywhere so long as they're above the B. (Though you probably don't want F# and G# side by side....) (The fifth is sometimes omitted from 9 chords, but here it's the slash note, so it has to be there.)

Well the lowest notes aren't in contention of course, but it's troubling that you feel that the notes of the E9 chord "can go anywhere so long as they're above the B".

Either the entire notion of inversion is without any value at all (other than to define the lowest note), or the slash chord is not meant to indicate anything about 'inversion' as the term is commonly understood. Your opening choice of voicing for the E9/B is perfectly reasonable if you were to accept it as a "2nd inversion E9" but as interpretations go it isn't easy on the ear. I think that's because E9/B isn't meant to be translated as a "2nd inversion E9"; as a specification for a chord it isn't at all useful.

My take on 'inversion' is that it can only apply effectively to relatively basic chords as a means of teaching how the harmonic character of such a chord remains intact even when we take the lowest note and plop it on the top.

Lead sheet chords don't fall into this category, hence neither do slash chords.

My voicing for those 2 chords would be:-

D2 A2 D3 F#3
B1 G#2 D3 F#3

- sound familiar?

The root note would be played singly by the LH and the remaining triad with the RH. If I were to think in terms of inversion for those chords I'd think it more meaningful to consider ONLY what's happening in the RH (because the root is already defined in the lead sheet).

Hmmm.... Perhaps I should say that the slash notation doesn't place any constraints on where the upper notes go. "Anywhere" is allowed by the notation, but of course we want it to sound good.

If what I picked for E9/B isn't easy on the ear, it's because I'm just typing at the computer. I didn't actually play it first. If I had probably I would have thought to myself, "Well, that sucks. Let's try this...." ;-)

But 'inversion' defines a very specific layout of the component notes of a chord.

In a slash chord, you've already agreed it only defines the root note allowing carte blanche for the layout of the other chord notes. How can that compare with the precision of an inversion?

Er, no, I don't think so. This was covered earlier in the thread.

A first inversion means the third is the root note and a second inversion means the fifth is the root note. The order or placement of the remaining notes is not defined.

zrtf90 is correct.

Now I'm confused, I thought inversions were always formed, beginning on the first note, and finding the other two, or three if you repeat the bottom note at the top, by moving up the keyboard. I'm talking about one hand playing here.

For example starting on E, you have to find the G immediately above, then the C. Playing a C major chord first inversion with E, C and G is simply out of reach for most hand sizes. Similar with second inversion.

I've watched many tutorial videos, and all talk of inversions in them, has always been in line with what I've described above here. I usually watch only beginner to early intermediate videos, so I don't know if this is different in higher piano education.

Maybe it's best to say, that any combination of the notes C, E, and G, any number of each note, is a C major chord in some form. When we're talking of two hands playing, I find it helpful to view the different combinations of a chord's notes, as voicings, like someone said here earlier.

I don't normally think in Roman Numerals, so I do use slash chords for everything, though most of the time they are just constructs. They are more things I feel in my hand. If, for instance, I hear an E7 chord, but the D is on top and an E is on the bottom, if I had to describe what I'm hearing, I would write:

E7/B

But I think what we are running into is two VERY different concepts of what "inversion" means.

For me it is part of what a chord is, and that is linked to voicing. It says nothing to me about the RH being in some simple voicing. For me that is separate.

That is 100% correct. The chord tell me what notes are likely to be spread out over both hands, and the slash tells me when something is going to be the bass that is not the root of the chord. I glance will tell me if that bass note is or is not part of the chord.

That all seems on the money to me. To me C7/E could be something as simple as E G Bb C, but that would be VERY unlikely. I read that as C7 chord (in some form) with E in the bass.

And there is something more important, which you get to later in this thread.

The moment you have 9 chords, or 11 chords, or "add something" chords, you then have something that can't be inverted.

Consider something rather common: C7b9.

Now imagine someone writes something like C7b9/E, and calls it a "first inversion flat 9 chord".

You have E G Bb C Db, which in most cases is simply an ugly, artificial thing that no one wants to hear.

So it doesn't work.

There are probably better examples, but the whole idea of simple inversions goes right out the window when something goes past an octave or when it has extra color tones.

Then, as you say, there are omissions. Sooner or later, no matter how many chord symbols we invent, a really nice voicing has to be notated to make clear what we want, or what someone else wants.