Inversion Exercises

[boy2man]

Hi everyone, I've been taking piano classes for a few months now. I'm a fledgling songwriter, but until this point really only tried to play by ear, and that was quite limiting.

Does anyone have any recommendations for inversion exercises? What I do now is play a chord on the left side of the keyboard, and do all the inversions up to the end of the keyboard. First with my right hand and then with my left. Then together from left to right. Are there any better exercises?

[ted]

When I was learning chords years ago I found it more productive to play each position around the key circle than to take one chord in one key and play all positions of it within each key. Clearly both ways are possible. My teacher seemed to think that the former was more conducive to memory and improvisation. I've no way of knowing how right he was. One obvious advantage is that his way certainly makes you think much more rapidly.

It also pays to constantly vary the way you play them. Break them up in as many physical ways and rhythms as you can think of so that each time you do it the result varies from day to day and is fresh. The same goes for scales and any keyboard pattern at all.

Once you have a lot of chords and positions in your memory, precise transposition around the circle will become pretty dull musically. At that stage you allow new ideas and phrases to come out as they occur, vary things as you go around the circle and generally escape from the cyclic sequence altogether.