The Secret to Beautiful Chord Progressions

Here’s the secret to beautiful chord progressions on the piano: inversions.

Chord inversions may seem intimidating to new piano players, but they’re worth learning, I promise. And instead of memorizing a bunch of inversions (boring!), we’ll show you the magic of inversions through an exercise that sounds good and is fun to play.

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The Chords

For this exercise, we’ll be using the following chord progression:

Am – G – C – F

But we won’t play standard triads. Instead, we’ll voice each chord like this:

Am

G

C

F

With your left hand, play the root notes of each chord:

A – G – C – F

The Theory Behind This

Okay, let me explain how this works.

Inversions are when we shuffle the order of the notes in a chord stack. There’s a method to this: the first inversion of a C major triad is when we flip C to the top, making E-G-C. And the second inversion of a C major triad is another flip, making G-C-E.

Here are all the chords and their inversions:

Am

G

C

F

You’ll see that in our exercise, we’re playing inversions of chords but omitting a middle note. Customizing the order of notes in a chord and omitting or adding notes is called voicing a chord.

Why play chords like this?

Inversions are useful because they help us transition from chord to chord in a smoother, easier way. For example, here’s me transitioning from the root position of a C major triad to the root position of an F major triad:

And here’s me transitioning from the root position of a C major triad to the second inversion of an F major triad:

See how the movement is much smaller and easier in the second animation? Neat, huh!

Inversions also spice things up. By mixing up the order of notes in a chord, we retain the quality and function of the chord (C major 1st inversion still sounds like C major) but the sound is somewhat different. Which keeps things interesting!

In this exercise, when we omit the middle note of our chord stacks, we end up playing sixths. A sixth is one of the most beautiful intervals out there. It just harmonizes so well! 

We hope this lesson inspires you to play some inversions! If you want to learn more, here are some more in-depth lessons on chord theory and chording:

• Chord Theory 101
• Chord Inversions, Explained (With Free Downloadable Cheat Sheets!)
• 10 Awesome Piano Chord Progressions (And How They Work)

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