Make your chord inversions easier by being smarter about your finger choice

Whenever we watch someone who's great at their craft, our first reaction is usually, "How do they make it look so easy?" For piano players, especially those trained primarily in classical music, the sight of expert pop and rock players moving through a chord progression can look like wizardry, as the sound changes but the hands barely seem to move. More impressively, their eyes are on the crowd and not their hands. There's a reason for this: inversions and anchoring.

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Let's look at a simple four chord progression, this time in the key of B flat major. Our four chords will be Bb (Chord I), Gm (Chord vi), Eb (Chord IV) and F (Chord V). The I, vi, IV, V progression is instantly familiar - when we play it with every chord in root position, it's Heart & Soul - a.k.a "my first ever piano chord song".

The notes in each of the chords are as follows:
Bb = Bb D F
Gm = G Bb D
Eb = Eb G Bb
F = F A C

The first question to ask yourself when looking at any progression is "Which chord will be the trickiest to play technically?" In this case, I'm going to say it's Eb, as it has two flats in it. In root position, our 1st and 5th fingers would be on black notes, which is not taboo, but if I can avoid it I usually will. The easiest position for me to play Eb major is in its first inversion.

Eb (first inversion) = G Bb Eb

This places our thumb on the G and is a much better fit for the natural shape of our hand. Now that I have the inversion we're going to use for the trickiest chord, we're going to base all of our inversions around this one.

Bb =  F     Bb   D
Gm =   G   Bb   D
Eb =    G   Bb      Eb
F =    F   A    C

Essentially, we've lined up all of the common notes from each chord. We can now see how each chord relates exactly to the next, giving us a great view of the relationships between the chords by looking at which notes change and which stay the same. You might be surprised at few notes are used across an entire progression.

Now that we have our inversions, we're going to go one step further and assign a finger to each note that we use in every chord, starting from the highest note down.

In this case, the highest note we play is an Eb, so it gets assigned finger number 5.
Next we have D, that is for our 4th finger.
Then we have C, which belongs to our 3rd finger.
Our 2nd finger will take care of both Bb and A.
Our 1st finger will look after G and F.

        1     2     4
Bb =  F     Bb   D

          1    2     4
Gm =   G   Bb   D

          1    2        5
Eb =    G   Bb      Eb

        1    2    3
F =    F   A    C

We are now using every finger on our hand, in a nice relaxed position, across every chord. With these fingerings, our hand doesn't have to move at all - our fingers do all the work. Best of all, with the top three notes of our progression given dedicated fingers, our hand is now anchored to a spot on the piano. The more we can anchor our hand, the better our ability to play without having to look at our hand.

It may seem unusual to use fingers 1, 2 & 3 to play a root position triad as we're using for the F chord, but in this case, it's the easiest fingers for us to use in order to continue our progression back to Bb. Our hand hasn't moved. In fact, the only fingers that have moved horizontally at all are our 1st and 2nd fingers, which are the strongest at perpendicular movement. 

Never be afraid of making things easier - if you can get the notes under your fingers the easiest way possible, then you can focus your energy on the emotion of the song, using light and shade, dynamics, rhythm and space to tell your story. Classical pianists can look at the piano as much as they want, as a pop performer, you need to be able to raise your eyes to the crowd as often as your possibly can.

​With inversions and anchoring, you will.