First thing I want to say is this video is really optional. I realized after making the whole series of videos for the second week that, I'm assuming that you have a kind of a comfort level with the notation that's used for inversions. Now some of you may not have that. And, because of that I want to add in a video in the very beginning, to kind of explain the notation of inversions. Now over the next well the rest of the, the weeks, the next five weeks. I'll be using these terms like, you know, instead of saying V and first inversion I'll say V6 or, you know, a I chord and second inversion is V6-4. What I wanted to explain like, why that is. Where do these names come from, in case you're not familiar with it. And in case it's new to you, I'm giving you a kind of grounding so that you can understand why these, where these terms come from. So that you can more easily remember them. Now, here's a triad and this is a root position triad. And, if we were in the key of C, we would label this, well, we would label it I. Let me do that now. Just, okay. So I label this I. But of course in music we don't always have the root in the bass. Let me do that. Sometimes what we have instead, is that the third is in the bass like there. This is still a I chord, but this note is the lowest sounding note. So we have a, a set of symbols that we use. Set of numbers actually. That indicate that the third is in the bass or the fifth is in the bass. Now, these come out of what's called figured bass. In the old days, you'd just have a, a bass line. And a bunch of, numbers either above it or below it. And from that, a keyboardist who is trained in figured bass could actually make an entire accompaniment part. If I were to analyze this so, let me just say, this I would label as a I6, and so you'd say, well, why? Why do you call this a I6? It has everything to do with the intervals between these notes. Maybe I should step back and say that, all though we just call this one. Technically this is I5-3 Technically this is I5-3 Don't ever write that, but this is technically I5-3. Why? Well, if we look at the farthest interval from the root we see it's a fifth, and then the one below that is a third. And so if we look at this, we see that this is a sixth and this is a third. So technically what this is, Technically what this is, is a I6-3 chord. Let me then repeat this and shift that up there. Now we have the fifth in the bass. Then we see that we have six between the lowest note and the highest note of the chord, and four. So this is actually chord I oops 6-4 chord. Now, in notating these things, though we try to be as brief as possible. So in this I, even though it's technically I6-3 We actually just notated as I6. This one, well because this already has the six we need the four. So we notate this as I6-4. Okay, well let's take seventh chords. And I'll use the V7 for this to, to illustrate. So if we saw this chord we'd say oh its a V7, but what happens if we take it and we put it in inversion, let's say first inversion. Let's take this note, put it all the way on the top. Well now we've got, we do the same trick, yeah. We measure from the top to the bottom. We have a sixth, a fifth and a third. So this is technically a 6-5 and actually, somehow you're supposed to be able to put in a 3, but I don't know how to put in a 3. This is technically a 6-5-3 chord, but we don't, in notating it we don't put in the three we just notate this as a 6-5 chord. Let’s keep going. Repeat that. Shift this up to the top, now we have the fifth in the bass well lets see what we've got. We've got, a 6 and a 4 and a 3. Well, if we only use 6-4, that would just say that it's this chord. And that's not true, right? So, if we needed to boil this down to two numbers. Probably better to say that it's a 4- 3 chord, and we'll assume that the 6 is in there. Let's keep going while we only have two inversions with the triad, we have three inversions with the seventh chord because there are
four notes. So let's shift this one up there, and now we've got the seventh in the bass. We've got 6. We have 4, and we have 2. Well, again, 6-4 won't help us because this is the 6-4 chord. So probably something like 4-2 might make the most sense. And this is the, notation that I'll use. Now, in fact, some even abbreviate this further and just call this a 5-2 chord. I won't use this notation, but understand that it's the, the notation comes out of the same process we were just talking about, where we don't have to put down every interval that exists in the inversion. We just put down the ones that are necessary to indicate that it's a certain kind of inversion. So, I'll call this a 4-2 chord. Now, you may say, okay that's all fine, I understand that when I see it like this, but, what if we have that, oops, what if we have that chord, let's say that V4-2 chord again. And we do something like this. It's voiced like this. Well, you know, you'd say, well this isn't a V4-2. This is like a, what's the interval here? This is like a, I don't even know what it is. But this, the smallest interval is a ninth. And the one after that is, you know, whatever. It's an octave and a sixth. So it's like a, what's that, a thirteenth. And no, we don't, we don't analyze that way. You just have to recognize the chord. And we say this is a V chord. And you see that the seventh is in the bass. And from there, you just say, it's a V 4-2. So it doesn't really matter, you know if, if it was like this. We can move that there. Or this would be a very bad voicing, but nonetheless, you see. It doesn't matter if it's voiced like this, how, however it's voiced, or if this was even up an octave, like that. It doesn't matter. This, all of these that I've just put down here, are all V4-2 chords. And the 4-2 is just telling us what the base note is. So I hope that gives, for those who needed it, I hope that gives a kind of framework for understanding the theory behind the notation of inversions. And now we should begin really with week two material, talking about basic progressions with inversions.