Turning a Chord on its Head with Major Chord Inversions

The most common way to play a chord is known as the root position, meaning the root of the chord is the lowest note played, with the third and fifth notes above it.

But you don’t always have to play chords that way, in fact you can use either the third or fifth note as the lowest tone and it will still sound fine.

Before we get into that, let’s back up and look at things in a bit more detail:

Major Chord Primer

First of all let’s talk about how to construct a chord. For the purposes of this post I’m just going to talk about major chords, but the same principles apply with other types of chords as well.

A major chord essentially consists of three notes. These three notes are often called a triad (“tri” meaning three).

The first note is the note that gives the chord it’s name. For example if we’re playing a C chord, the root note is C. The second note of our chord is the third note of the C major scale, which is E. The last note we need is the 5th note of the scale, which is G. So our C major triad consists of C E and G, played like this:

–x–
–x–
–0– G
–2– E
–3– C
–x–

You could turn this into a four or five note chord by playing the C and/or E on the top two strings, but for now we’re just going to concern ouselves with the triad.

1st Inversion

To get the first inversion of a chord, you move the root note from the lowest note to the highest. In this case, the order of the notes from bottom to top will be, E G C, like this:

–x–
–1– C
–0– G
–2– E
–x–
–x–

Try playing this on your guitar to get a sense of the difference in sound between a chord in root position and 1st inversion. The difference in sound is subtle but noticeable. Being able to hear different inversions is a fairly advanced ear training skill that will help you a lot when learning songs by ear.

2nd Inversion

The second inversion of a chord involves putting the 5th note of the chord on the bottom, with the root note next and the third on top. In our example it would be G C E:

–0– E
–1– C
–0– G
–x–
–x–
–x–

Again, try playing the second inversion and listen for the differences in sound between root position, first inversion and second inversion.

There is actually a third inversion that involves seventh chords, but that will be the topic for another post. Until then have some fun figuring the root, 1st and 2nd inversions of different chords on your guitar and I catch up with you all later.