Mastering Inversions?!

Thanks @keynut, I have heard of it, and that it’s very useful. Is it for mobile devices only, or is there a desktop version as well ? Which do you use ?

Thanks, Natasha

Hi Natasha :wave:t2:

That sounds like great exercise.

It can be fun to set ourselves little challenges like this.

Something I like to do is set some ‘parameters’ which I must adhere to for the purpose of an exercise, for example, I pick up a tune and the exercise could be:

  • play though all the left hand voicings in a specific inversion, perhaps an inversion that I wouldn’t instinctively play such as the 3rd inversion.

  • try voice all of my chords using some kind of quartal harmony

  • every one of my left hand voicings must contain just 3 notes and also a minor 2nd interval somewhere in the voicing. I particularly like this kind of drill because I discover lots of interesting clusters of notes that I wouldn’t usually consider playing.

Now when I do this this kind of thing, it doesn’t always sound particularly musical - in fact sometimes it’s quite the contrary :grin: - but it forces me to step outside of the normal ‘routes’ I would go down when playing a tune, particularly one that I have played for many years.

It forces me to think on my feet, in the moment, and explore different pathways to where my regular muscle memory would take me.

The fun thing is that we can set any ‘parameters’ we want to make sure it’s a topic that we are comfortable with, or perhaps an area of jazz that we specifically want to work on.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers!
Hayden

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I have found iRealPro to be super useful, Natasha. I have it on my Android mobile and it’s perfectly fine but if I had a tablet I would probably install it there. I use it all the time-- learning tunes, rootless voicings, progressions practice of all kinds (via the iRP jazz practice folder). Just yesterday, I used it to improvise on the bass lines of all the tunes I’m working on in my ‘active folder’.

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