Remember back when your teacher, (possibly me), told you that the deepest pitch in a chord should be its root note? Yeah, that was a lie. Sorry.

            It’s a good general rule though, because we like to hear root notes in the bass of a chord. Using other notes in the bass can have a dramatic effect on a chord’s overall sound, and we refer to these chords as Inversions. THIS VIDEO at around the 28min mark gives a great example of how using inversions can sound like entirely “new chords, a kind of optical illusion in sound”, (don’t watch all the video, the rest isn’t that relevant… I just like that quote).
In this lesson we’re going to work with open chords, and simply add or subtract strings and see what that does to the chord. But first off we need to cover some theory basics. It’s easy enough to remember that Inversions are just an interesting was of voicing a chord. It’s a little trickier to remember the different names for each inversion, which depend on which Chord Tone is being put in the bass. They are as follows…

• We refer to chords that use the root note in the bass as the Root Position.
• Chords using the 3^rd in the bass are referred to as being the First Inversion.
• Using the 5^th in the bass is known as the Second Inversion.
• Using the 7^th in the bass is called the Third Inversion, (we won’t be using 7^ths today).

            Be aware that the precise order of the other notes really doesn’t matter, provided the entire triad is being used in there somewhere.
The most common, and certainly the easiest way of writing these is as Slash Chords. However, these give no obvious information as to which Chord Tone is being used, so you won’t necessarily know which Inversion it is right away, (unless you happen to know all the notes in all the chords… In which case, why are you here?) I’ll give you that information as well in this lesson.

Let’s play some music.

I’ll walk you through what happens to an open E chord when we remove strings, and the chart below will show what happens when we do the same to other chords.
Start by playing an open E Major chord. Nice. Now, we’re going to not play that low E string. Although we’re voicing the E Major triad, it happens that the lowest pitch isn’t the root note any more. The lowest pitch is now a B which, as you should know, is the 5^th in this chord. So, this chord is the 2^nd Inversion of E, (which can also be called an E/B chord). Removing the A string makes this chord an E again, because the note played on the D string is the root note, E. Removing this D string will put the G# into the bass, which is the Maj 3^rd in this chord. That gives us the 1^st Inversion of E.
In the chart below I’ve used this same process with the other common open chords.

            Chords can get similarly interesting when we add open strings that weren’t previously there. For instance, if you play an open A chord, but include the low E string you get an A/E chord, (2^nd Inversion). Similarly, playing a D chord and including the open A string gives you D/A, (2^nd Inversion).

            In the next Inversions lesson we’ll talk about some practical uses for what we’ve just covered. After that we’ll move onto the 3^rd inversion, which involves 7 chords. For now try to get more comfortable with the theory you’ve just been introduced to, and play around with the chords in the chart above.

(THIS VIDEO is certainly worth a watch if you’d like to reinforce what you learn from my site today)