3min chapter

Strong Songs cover image

"Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" by Billy Joel

Strong Songs

CHAPTER

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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