 Welcome to another Art of Composing Daily Vlog. I'm John Brantingham, and today we are going to be talking about inversions. So if you are using harmony in any way and you're just sticking to root position chords, then you're probably going to start feeling like your harmony is a little bit stagnant or maybe a little bit boring. Let me show you what I mean. If we just use simple, simple progressions like... That's a 1, 2, a 6. There's nothing wrong with that progression. It works perfectly well. It's very functional. If you've seen my chart or seen my videos on harmony, you'll understand that it moves from left to right. Very simple progression. The thing about that though is that you're very limited. If I want to add any kind of variety here with root position chords, I need to figure out how to add a new chord. That kind of leaves you very limited options here. One way that you can add a lot of variety and nuance to your progressions is simply by changing what the base note is. That's really what inversions are all about. When we talk about inversions, often I'll show a triad. I'll show that triad moving up. It appears to be moving up, but the core of what an inversion is is not about moving up or moving down. It's about changing your base note. I can keep the same three notes in my right hand the whole time, but I can change what the base note is. You can see that the chord takes on somewhat of a different character. I don't know if anybody's nailed down why there's a different character to different inversions. I think a lot of it has to do with the internal interval. If you've got that as your base interval, that feels very different from that. They all have different tensions and tendencies to go different places. If we take that progression that I just did, and I'll try to do this with a few more progressions so you can get an idea, this is the progression. Let me change the inversion. In this one, I'm going to go from C to an A minor chord in first inversion. By doing that, what I'm doing is I'm changing the harmonic context of things, but I'm also giving a lot more stability. Right there, it feels a little more stable because we're not fully changing areas. At least the tonic feels a little more stable. Then from here, I could probably go to a first inversion IV chord, or I could do it another way around. I could say C goes to A minor root position, but then change that to a first inversion IV chord. You can see all it's doing is it's changing the emotional context of the notes that you're using. Same progression, different bass notes, meaning different inversions. Let me back up a little bit now and talk about the different kinds of inversions. We have root position. You've got the root in the bass, and actually let me jump back even more just in case people aren't familiar with the terms. When you have a scale, we can build what are called triads based off skipping a scale step. Those three notes together are called the triad, and we've got seven triads, and it repeats when you go all the way up the octave. Within each of these triads, choosing what the bass note is changes the inversion. I like to practice in both hands different kinds of chord voicings, so you can have closed voicings moving up in inversions. You can have open voicings. You can practice doing your inversions in different ways, and you don't necessarily have to stick to a set routine or anything like that. Just play around and have fun. Let me do a couple more progressions just so you can hear these and get them in your ear. This is a root progression. The note is canon in D. This is a C major, but it's a very simple progression that is used called the Roman Nesca. It's hundreds of years old. But we can also change inversions on things. You can see it just gives it a slightly different character. That's probably good enough for now. What I would recommend is take a progression that you like, something that you've already written or something you can take from another piece, and then mess around by changing the bass notes to different notes within that chord. You'll find that it doesn't have to be so overwhelming as it's kind of made out in textbooks. About one six always goes to four or whatever. You don't necessarily have to worry about those rules just yet. It is good to know those eventually, kind of as little musical facts. However, if you've got a progression that works, there's a good chance you can make it work with a different bass line. And that's really what it's about. It's about giving your harmonic progression a slightly different bass line and changing the context. So hopefully you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please subscribe and then hit the little bell icon next to the subscription button so that way you get notified of any symposiums. And if you're interested in learning to compose, definitely check out my Music Composition 101 course, which teaches you all the fundamentals. Everything I'm talking about here, intervals, inversions, chords, scales, melody, harmony, form, a little bit of orchestration at the end of that course. And then that moves on and graduates to the Sonata form course, which I teach you how to basically take your skills of writing eight measure, twelve measure, sixteen measure themes, and turning that into a four or five-minute piece of music. So with that, I will talk to you tomorrow.