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"Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" by Billy Joel

Strong Songs

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The Importance of Inversions in Songwriting

Chord inversions are when you put the notes in a different order and stack them differently. Billy Joel really likes to do this because it lets him keep his bass note moving on a steady scale up or down without having to jump around like he might if he played all of the chords in root position. It's related to a broader harmonic concept called voice leading which basically just means that as chords move from one to the next in a chord progression each note in the chord moves to the nearest tone in the next chord so keeps the whole progression kind of knitted together in one space.

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