Let's take a look at using inversion. So, what does it sound like for instance, if we use inversions rather than root position chords? Well, we have a short little progression here. i, V, i, iv, V. Very simple progression. Let me play it back so you can hear it. [MUSIC] It's voice led well and if this was the sound that you were after, then you would use these root position chords. But one of the things that happens in a progression where you only use root position chords is, you get a lack of smoothness. There's a lot of smoothness on the top three voices. But in the lowest voice. We always have to give the root, which means especially in a i, iv, V chord progression, we're jumping around a lot. Inversions can help us smooth that out. And so what I want to do, is show a sort of smoothed out version of this using inversions. Let me start by [MUSIC] Whoops. [MUSIC] Okay, let's start by actually using an open voice. An open structure rather than a closed structure. And the reason I need to do that is I need more room in the bass. The bass is going to be going up. And here, if I started here, I'd actually end up with the bass all the way up here. That's not what I want. Well, let's see. What I see is a i-V-i chord progression, I could put this in first inversion, and get the F sharp and the bass, and then go back to i. But that wouldn't help me smooth out going from i to iv. What I really like is for the i chord to be in first inversion then I get the B flat here, then the C and then the D and in fact if I look at this, what I could do, [MUSIC]. my bass could move just like a scale up to V. To do this, you might be looking at the, the handouts that I posted online. You can see that this is a good opportunity to use a passing 6-4 chord. Okay, so let's voice that. If that's the case then, I should, whoops. Should be able to do that. Then, let's see if I want, this is a D major chord. Well, I've got the D there, so let's keep that. [MUSIC] As the common tone and let's move the other one by step. [MUSIC] And let's check the voice leading. Okay, so we've got root, third, fifth, fifth. Should I double the fifth? Well, it is a passing 6-4 chord. 6-4 chords always double the fifth. So, yes, this is, this is looking good. And then I want to voice lead further. Well, I have that common tone still, so let me keep that common tone. [MUSIC] And it would kind of makes sense if this went up as well. [MUSIC] So we get that. So we get root, third, fifth, and then, well, what else should we put? Well, putting another root would be up here, another fifth would be up here. Maybe another root would be nice. [SOUND] And then in the melody, you get this nice shape here. From the third scale degree down to the first scale degree. Good, now we have to go to the iv chord. Well we have a common tone but we have two common tones. So what I would say is, well you can try out, let's see what happens if we keep this common tone, just as an experiment. Probably we'd end up doing something like this. [MUSIC] That's okay, we have this big leap here though, in the, the tenor. It's not a problem if this was the voice leading you needed to do, the, I don't see any voice leading problems with this. But, maybe. [MUSIC] If we kept that. [MUSIC] And got that. Maybe that's a bit smoother. So I'm going to go with this one. And then we have iv to V. So we know that we need. We don't have any common tones. We're going from root position chord to root position chord. What we need to do here with the upper three voices, is move them in contrary motion if possible. To the nearest chord tone, which is completely possible here. We move the G to an F sharp. [MUSIC] We move the C to an A and the E flat to a D. [MUSIC] So I can continue on here. I'm going to put in a, [NOISE] Roman numeral analysis. i, [NOISE] V6-4 [NOISE] i6, [NOISE] iv, V. Now let me play it back. I'll play back both of them. Same harmonic progression. But they'll sound fairly differently. Not just because the melody's a bit different, but because of the chord inversions. [MUSIC] So you can hear there's a certain amount of smoothness that's added to this. That doesn't exist here. And that is the case largely because we've changed the bass and used inversions so that we get a step wise motion in the bass voice. So this is a great example of how you can use inversions to create really a different kind of musical experience that you just can't get with root position chords. There's one other thing that I can add in here, just as a, for demonstration purposes. And that's the cadential 6-4. Anytime I see a V chord and here I've got a lot of space. I got a whole measure, four beats. Why don't I change this a little bit? Let me see, what if I, if I did this and I, instead didn't have this. I'm going to copy this whole thing because this is where I'm going but before I get there I'm going to keep the common tone there. I'm going to move that there, instead. Now I've slipped in a cadential 6-4 as well. Let's go back and listen to this. [MUSIC] So, you can see that inversions can really help you get something very graceful as well. And something very smooth and add, not just character, but dimension to the music that you're creating. It opens up a whole new set of options, for the composer.