Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are going to look at all things you need to know about slash chords. First off we are going to define them, we are going to distinguish them from traditional chord inversions. We'll also look at the types of slash chords out there involving three notes as well as four notes and then how you can actually bring out the flavor, how it can actually sound like a slash chord with two of the traditional voicing techniques that we use to make it actually sound unique and different and so on. And then we look at five use cases for slash chords which will hopefully motivate you to use them a lot in your music. So most of this will be using a bunch of triads, we are not going to use fancy seventh chords and other such things in this lesson, it's just going to be based on triads, major, minor and some diminished here and there. So you should be able to understand this lecture at pretty much any skill level. So before we get started it will be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications. Also my notes are available on our Patreon page, you could consider getting yourselves a copy. Let's get cracking. First of all a slash chord you will find two letters or two musical symbols. The first one, so if I take an example C slash E, C slash E the symbology is a bit weird because C slash E means E is on the right side or on the high side but actually what it means it's a triad or a chord which is on the left side slash what you want to play in the bass. So if you take C slash E you're playing a C major chord and whichever inversion you play is fine that's up to you, whichever voicing you play is fine that's also up to you but the slash E is very important, the slash E means that you will be playing E as the bass note, the lowest note will be E and all the intervals the interval relationship between all the notes of what you're playing in that chord at that time is based on not C which you would think C major right but it's actually going to be based on the E because the lowest frequency which is the bass note in this case E that's going to be the foundation from there all the intervals of the chord are felt by our ear and when we feel a bunch of intervals over a chord which has three or four notes we process that entire feeling as a theme or a mood or we say oh that sounds happy or that sounds sad or that sounds scary and so on and so forth so C slash E first of all C slash E it could have been even C minor slash something so it could have so let me show you two examples C slash E would be C major chord because the thing on the left is the triad so that will be given the triad symbol C is not just the note C it's the triad C so what is C capital it means C major isn't it so you can play C major as whichever way you know best so I am playing that as a piano player I would tend to play that in and around middle C and slash E means you want to give it an E base you can either do that down below it sounds very obvious or what I like to do is stack up the E's and play it as an octave so you really feel the bass and you feel the very obvious difference between this and the usual C major you'll feel that there's a lot of tension and instability in this chord while for the major chord it feels like home like a very resolved sound okay so let's consider another slash chord let's look at C minor slash E flat so what does that mean C minor the thing on the left is the triad so C minor will be written usually by C and an M sign so we can play it any which way in the right hand inversions don't really matter it will be the pretty much the same C minus forward slash E flat so what does that mean E flat in the base and the C minor chord in the right hand so you could make it more obvious with octaves there we go very very different than C minor isn't it this is C minor this is C minor slash E flat so that's how you read a slash chord it'll always have a triad or a seventh chord or some chord and then slash whatever it may be whatever note you want to play in the base so a good way to generalize this maybe using Roman numerals or using the generalizations of chords would be if you take C slash E the way I like to write it is if you're in the scale of C major C is the Roman one C is the first degree of C major right so you could write it as capital one slash what so the way I like to write it is you do a slash three the reason being the E is a major third with respect to C so C major's third is E so it's Roman one slash normal English three okay so this is a bit this is unofficial it's not in an official theory textbook but it's just a way of writing slash chords that works for me because I can take that slash to be anything I can now say C major which is still Roman one we know the degree of C major in the C major scale is what Roman one right it's the first degree and the quality of the chord is major so capital one means major capital Roman one means major so capital Roman one I can do that slash anything so I can do this slash seven flat what will be the seven flat with respect to C B flat right so I can do a C major slash B flat so that's generally how I like to write it or you can do a C major slash six flat which would be C major slash A flat these are more complex slash chords because they have more than three notes in them or you can do C major slash or capital capital one slash four which will be C major slash the four in the base so the four will become the degree with respect to the chord you're in okay so slash chords versus inversions a lot of students will tell me in a class if I play C major G C E isn't it C slash G well the are well I might agree with you but it doesn't motivate me to feel it as a slash chord if you play it as a cluster of notes in a triadic way so G C E or C even E G C the advantage of right hand inversions and I call them right hand inversion specifically because these sort of structures work primarily in the right hand if you play all this stuff in the left hand sounds pretty annoying if you ask me so for the most part you don't even play triads in the left hand as a solo piano player as an accompanist you tend to play triads in the right hand so that's completely fine so piano triads played as inversions like this to me don't change the flavor of the chord or the goal of the chord or the state of the chord the state is still whatever a major chord wants to be or a minor chord still feels minor and off still feels stable what the inversions are doing though is they are highlighting the the right most or the top most pitch of this structure so if you take G C E flat you're able to hear distinctly you're able to hear E flat on top so it's highlighting the top note versus if you play C minor like this it's highlighting the G on the top or if you play C minor like this E flat G C the advantage here is it's highlighting the C on the top so this will provide for good voicing strategies if you're trying to do an arrangement for an ensemble let's say a string quartet or a choir or some group of players playing a variety of instruments right so generally speaking inversions are played in the right hand because it doesn't sound muddy it sounds clear the frequencies can breathe with respect to each other inversions don't really change the flavor of the chord they they're just there to make I guess to make chord playing a bit more convenient for the player and to bring out the top note register I've done a lot of videos on chord inversions exercises to shift them so we leave that in the description with a list of those videos do check them out after watching this video so coming back to slash chords there are two basic types of slash chords if I have to categorize them you have slash chords that have three notes and you have slash chords with four notes so a slash chord with three notes generally will be a triad let's say a C major chord with a bass note that is not its root so if you take C major with C in the bass well I guess you could call it C slash C but then who wants to write such a thing it's annoying you might as well just call it C major so you don't have that chord available so the the the chords which work with C major with that have a note of C major in them you should ask yourself what are the remaining notes the remaining notes of the C major triad are E and G so these are the slash chords that have three notes in them because the whole total of notes will still be three C major has three notes C E G so C major slash E will still have three notes C major slash G will still have three notes because E and G are not adding to the party so if you take C major in the right hand and add E in the left hand gives you the slash chord vibe it definitely changes the the mood of the chord or the goal or the energy state of the chord but it still has three notes and then if you take C major forward slash G again it's a rather tense unstable chord it wants to go somewhere but it still has three notes so that's one type of slash chord the other type of slash chord will be a slash chord with that has four notes so if you take again the same C major you find a note which is not in this triad let's say D and you play that in the bass so now what you want to do is you can you can write this you can spell this as C slash D C major slash D you can do a chord like C major slash B flat however these are four note voicings of maybe more advanced chords they could be seventh they could be seventh chords at the bare minimum they they could also be ninth chords 11th chords nine sus four chords and so on and so forth so this will give you a lot of extended jazz extensions as you use them so if you take C major slash B flat for example you can call this as C slash B flat or you can name this as a B flat chord itself you can just look at B flat here and say okay what are the intervals with respect to B flat I have the I have the C which is the ninth I have the E which is the sharp 11 you could say and I have the G which is the sixth which you could say as the 13th or if I take a C major with a D in the bass now I can call this as C slash D or else I can name it as a D chord so what do I have in here I have a D I have a flat 7 I have a 9 and I have a 11 you can call this as a D 9 sus 4 because you don't really have a third in there so basically what I am saying is you can name it as a C slash D or you can give it with a fancy jazz name like a D 9 sus 4 I personally prefer the simpler way you're just telling yourself play a D major in the right hand and play a C in the left hand you get a very sophisticated sound without knowing too much of the theory and what is a 9th what is 11th and all these other things so that's another nice application for slash chords they make really complex chords seem very easy it's a triad there and a triad there you can even stack two triads perhaps you can do like a E flat major in the right hand and you can do a C minor in the left hand or you can do a D flat major in the left hand and an E flat major in the right hand I quite like the sound of that you get all these very interesting extended sounds just using a triad there or a triad there or a triad there in a simple bass there so let's now look at two real world ways to use slash chords as a piano player and this will involve two voicing strategies voicing strategy number one will involve the melody in the right hand generally you'll have to play the melody in right hand for most scenarios but the harmony or the chord is also going to be in the right hand so melody and chord in the right hand and then the bass note in the left hand so if you have a melody which which has C slash E you can go you play the triad here and you play a very big sounding bass note in the left hand that would be C slash E so and the top most note of the right hand will be the melody there we go the top note is the melody so this voicing strategy requires you to play one note in the left hand so that's let's say C slash E come back to our example there and I can play C major in the right hand in three ways G C E C E G or else E G C so that'll be your root position first inversion and second inversion I like to play it around middle C so that's generally a rule which I follow it's an unwritten rule but it works well for most songs root position first inversion second inversion you tend to want to play it in and around middle C for the most optimal sound and the bass in the left hand makes it a slash so with these three inversions you're highlighting different melody notes which you can also move around or float around for example this will sound really good when you play another chord following that right so that was all with the second inversion of C major if I do the root position of C major different melodic possibilities right of course there's a physical limitation that is the width of my hand I my hand can't stretch beyond a point so that that limitation also brings out the best in your creativity because you can't go anywhere you're kind of trapped only there and in that top register you have to float around about two or three fingers two fingers actually to get a nice melody like this one I think I'm taking C slash E and resolving it to F just to give you a context with two chords if I take the first inversion of C major that's E G C quite like that you get the top note to play around with melodically now the second style of voicing with slash chords on the piano would be melody exclusively in right hand the first style I told you play the bass note the slash note in the left hand now you're gonna play some kind of a chord technique in the left hand an exclusive melody in the right hand so spread voicing in the left hand if you take again the case which is C slash E to get that slash sound out of the chord we don't want to play it like this for two reasons one this sounds muddy it's theoretically right it is C slash E some app will probably tell you it's C slash E but doesn't sound like you could use this anywhere especially in a band or in a production with a lot of instruments so for the lower register of the piano the register which is an octave below middle C you could go with a spread shape so I'll be playing a slash chord instead of playing it as E G C I do it as E C G E C G and similarly other chords can be played like this you can play an A A major slash C sharp with a C sharp in the bottom and I think this makes the sound very rich very deep it's also very clean it's very easy on the ear you get that deep rich sound which is very hearable it's exactly how a cello would play chords in this in this register that's generally how cellos voice harmony this really this brings out the flavor of the slash harmony if you ask me G major this is C major slash E okay so you have to stretch out your hand a bit but a clever way to do this is with your sustained pedal if you have the pedal on you can take let's say if your hands can't stretch even mine can't that well so I'll go E C G and you see what I did with my wrist here I just curved it a bit I just turned it a little bit by it gave me maybe about an inch extra which I think is more than enough to play that interval that 10th interval there we go so you just hold down your pedal because without the pedal see the sound is gone so hold your pedal if you can't play the notes together which at least I can't all the time so this is a bit tough for me and it'll be much way tougher if you have to play chords like a flat slash E flat here I even my hand cannot stretch at all so even I need the pedal so pedal on E flat this is a nice A flat over E flat sound so this is bringing out the flavor of the slash chords it's giving you a very deep thick dense sound and getting your right hand to completely express itself melodically so your right hand just has to play play a tune or whatever your song melody is and see how low I can go a very low B flat there and I'm playing triads so this is the ideal way to play chords in the left hand if you ask me as a professional piano player so we've covered the essential theory of slash chords we've compared them with inversions we've looked at the distinction we've looked at the types of slash chords and just now we looked at the two important voicing techniques for slash chords now let's look at how you can use them now I've done a lot of videos on how you can use slash chords in different methods we leave some links in the description that will give you a lot more detail into it but I thought we'll package it into this lesson with a few different things which I have not covered before in earlier videos so the first kind of use of slash chord is resolution movements as I'm calling it so for that I'll give you two examples C slash E which we've been taking for a lot in this video where will C slash E resolve to so if you're in the C major scale C is the Roman one or the degree one of the C scale C slash E as I call it one slash three first of all is unstable so where would it want to go it would either want to go to the four major feel that normally in the C major scale C major is home but now if you play C slash E and take it to F major F major now feels like the home so that's the beauty of slash chords it it makes any other non slash chord sound very very stable it really leads you well to that C slash E taking it to F major so what about C slash G then C slash E C slash G will resolve to the G so C forward slash G that's one slash five seems to resolve pretty well to the five chord which is the dominant and you can resolve that dominant like it always does to the to the tonic that's rather weird C major slash E C major slash G C major the tonic chord is highly unstable C slash E goes to F it's waiting to go to F C slash G goes to G and to prove that C major is still stable G wants to then go back to C that's really weird so it so it kind of motivates you to realize that C slash E is very very different than a usual traditional C major it's almost like a completely different chord so if you see C slash E in your chord chart don't simplify that chord you there there is a reason for it it's going to be radically different than C major so don't and if not anything if you're in a band the bass player will get really angry with you because the bassist would be playing that E and then if you play a C that will be counterproductive you are going to ruin the sound he will want to play something unstable while you are trying to play something stable it will not it's going to clash so the second application of slash chords could be to climb from chord to chord and you can do this climb chromatically so if I take the C major chord this time I'm playing C major without a slash now I want to go from C major to D major now I think C major to D major doesn't sound very stable or very normal or very conventional but how do I make this journey a lot more beautiful sounding a lot more accessible I can add a chord in the middle what I add there C major A C sharp going to D I can even do an C major a 7 slash C sharp which pulls you stronger to D major that G wants to resolve to F sharp so without the slash chord you're just playing C major C major and D major sounds good but if you want to land on D major use the slash which is even more unstable and then the D major and what's happening here a is a fifth of D and when you do a slash C sharp it becomes an unstable slash chord but it also functions as a secondary dominant of the target chord which is D major secondary dominant means a is a five of the upcoming chord which is D so if you study the circle of fifths you should be good with figuring out fifths and fourths and thus secondary dominance we've done a detailed video on secondary dominance using a very famous song Doremi so you should check it out in the description so that's another nice use case of slash chords you can go on and on climbing I went chromatically from C and ended with C so this is another way to make slash chords a part of your vocabulary as a composer by adding them in between two triads and you can do this chromatically so that's about climbing movements another use case for slash chords would be take a static chord in the right hand let's say C major and experiment a chord progression or try to build a chord progression with just bass notes so one easy way to do it would be just drop chromatically you see all you need for a chord progression is bass movement you don't really need the whole chord to change and because of the bass movement being different it's forming a different note different note with respect to C major it starts adding some jazz extended harmony there we go aim for example a minor seventh C major slash G sharp C major slash G it all kind of works it's an ad nine you're getting so many chords for the price of one because in the right hand you're just playing C major and the left hand you're just experimenting with anything really well not anything it has to go well with your song it has to go well with the melody but it's not sounding dissonant as you can hear right and a lot of people have used this technique so you can do this with a major chord you can even do it with a minor chord if I take C minor so that's a minor chord with a slash movement C C minor over B flat C minor over A which is actually an A minor 7 flat 5 C minor over A flat which is actually an A flat major 7th and now you get to this very G sus sound which is actually a C minor over G very diminished sound I think everything except a major third and a minor third clashing together seems to sound good in a slash environment so that's about static chord movements and why not reverse it why not have the base to be the same now and change the triad in the right hand register so let's do that with I just played show you know that one so you get these interesting movements like for example I have C here and I'm thinking I'm in the C major scale and what chord shall I play maybe let's go a bit out of it I want to do a six flat seven flat one which I call as the epic cadence what happened in the base it's just C so A flat over C B flat over C and C major over C or I can do something very Elton John like in pretty much take any chord and go up a fourth play the four major over that same base and then come back that's F with B flat which is its perfect for this can definitely spice up the harmony so Austin Ato base is what I'm calling that because the bass is staying the same it's holding its ground and the last movement where slash chords I think are the dominant force you cannot live without them is where you have a contrary motion between the base movement and the melodic movement so this is used a lot for classical music it's probably it's maybe a forgotten art I guess so if you take a movement like this which I think is a is pretty classical sounding so what's happening there there's an A B C C sharp D bass is climbing up right what's the soprano or the melody doing soprano is coming down so how do you make this sound more acceptable or more presentable you would go with chords and now it closes that gap it makes it work you can hear both melodies and you have the chords inside what are the chords right now you have a normal a minor G slash B a minus slash C a seventh slash C sharp and then D major so a lot of slash chords in there right maybe you can come down I can do a D major slash C G major slash B maybe a minor normal G over B a minor over C I like this movement with the dominant chord so D is the five of G I can do a G major over D resolve to the five dominant and end with the tonic let's do that again something like that so you'll find this a lot in choral choir music you'll find it in orchestral music and some classical music for sure where you're stacking a bunch of parts together but you want them to move you want them to have that you want them to have a conversation with each other so harmony is not just about stacking notes together and then singing a melody on top of that you could argue that harmony is the melody you know or the melody exists because of the harmony right so that's how I guess some of the older music was composed it was pretty much many melodies coming together to create the harmony and we call that concept counterpoint we can probably do a lesson on that in the near future so these were a few of my thoughts on slash chords do also follow up this video by watching some of the other videos where I've given some specific piano exercises I've explored the theory a lot more in detail and a lot more use cases as well so have fun with slash chords I hope you appreciate them a lot better I hope you understand their distinction and I will catch you in the next video till then it'll be awesome if you could hit that subscribe button if you haven't already hit the bell icon for regular notifications leave us a comment with anything you'd like us to cover in the future also what you thought about this video and give the video a like and share if possible cheers