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Advanced Chording
Knowing every type of chord is only part of understanding and mastering chords. There are a few techniques that can
help you harmonize easily and on the spot.
Firstly, inversions. We touched briefly on inversion in the first chording lesson, but as a refresher an inversion
is a chord started on a note other than the root (or tonic). An example would be Cmaj7:
C E G B
1st inversion:
E G B C
2nd inversion:
G B C E
3rd inversion:
B C E G
The advantage to this is that they sound exactly the same and can serve two purposes. One, they can raise the chord
less than an octave and preserve the tone of the chord. This is useful for when you are looking for just that
certain pitch. The other and even more useful (although often overlooked) is convenience. There are times changing
from one chord to the next when your hands simply cannot reach the next chord in time, regardless of instrument. At
these times it may be that while you can’t reliably reach the next chord’s root inversion, you can perhaps reach one
of it’s inversions.
Other good things to practice are runs and fills. A run or fill is a series of notes played to transition from one
chord to the next without a gap in the backup or rhythm. Perhaps the most important thing to remember about fills is
that when you are playing a fill, you are more than likely the center of attention, if only for a moment. Thus
whatever notes you play must sound good. The easiest way to assure this is to either play entirely within the key
of the song or within the chords you are switching to and from. A more interesting and only marginally more
difficult manner of playing a run would be to play improv within the chords as you change but not to use the same
notes for each chord. An example would be a switch from Cmaj to Gmaj.
Cmaj7 Gmaj7
C G
E B
G D
B F#
The first method would entail only playing within the songs key - more often than not you can’t go wrong. Just as
easy but requiring a little more forethought would be playing only the notes the two chords have in common, in this
case G and B. The third option would mean improvising within Cmaj7 then changing to B using the tones they have in
common, again G and B.
There are quite a few other ways to fill gaps in the music, some subtle and some not so subtle, but if you master the
simpler methods you are part of the way to being able to solo, which we’ll deal with in the next lesson.
Learned this material? Take the quiz and finalize it!.
Continue to Part 2
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