All of the chords that we looked at in the last lesson were the Major Chords in the open position. Today, we're going to look at the other side of the spectrum and focus on Minor Chords in the open position.
When we have another theory lesson we will go in depth as to what makes a chord Major or Minor, but for now we will just recodnize them as happy and sad chords. I can't gaurantee that every lesson will have a simple analogy that you would likely see on Seasame Street, but I'm gonna try my darndest (is that a word? I don't know...).
The Major chords sound happy.
The Minor chords sound sad.
This is the easiest way to tell the difference between, just by hearing the chords, whether a chord is major or minor. The only difference in any given chords major and minor variations is just one note, the b3 (flatted 3rd). For example, a G Major chord has the notes G - B - D in it, whereas a G Minor chord consists of G - Bb- D. Without jumping ahead a few lessons, we will just use our happy and sad differentiation for the moment.
When writing out the chord name, we need to indicate whether the chord is a Major or Minor chord. The way that we show that difference is to place a lowercase 'm' after the chord name. For instance, sticking with our G chord, if we were to write a song that had a G Major chord in it, we would indicate it as so: G, but if that chord were a G Minor, then the chord would need to be written like this: Gm.
Here is a list of all the open minor chords we will be learning today: Am, Em, Dm. Remember, these chords are shown in standard tuning.
Am:
----0----
----1---- (i)
----2---- (r)
----2---- (m)
----0----
----x----
Em:
----0----
----0----
----0----
----2---- (m)
----2---- (i)
----0----
Dm:
----1---- (i)
----3---- (r)
----2---- (m)
----0----
----x----
----x----
These are all of the (common) non-barred chords in open position. (You mean theres more kinds of chords??) There's actually hundreds of chord shapes once you begin putting in all of the variations and different ways to compose a chord, but let's pump the brakes. We've got to get these chords rolling smoothly before we can jump into all of that. I want you to o through these chords the same way we approached the chords in the last lesson, putting emphasis on proper fretting technique and making clean transitions.
So now we've got some more chords to practice with...what to do now? Well I guess we could play a song. Try this on for size.... G - C - Em - C - G - D - C - G Sounds pretty good, right? You can take those 4 chords, mix them up any way you want to and play thousands and thousands of songs. Granted, to play along with your favorite songs with just those chords, you would need a capo to change the key of the song. I love using capos so much that I want to dedicate an entire lesson to them, but I will give you the basics today real quickly so you can get to jamming along with some songs.
A capo is a device that is either spring loaded
or uses a clamping
(screw-based) to clamp down on the strings of a guitar at any fret. What this does is it takes your standard tuning and transposes the notes up, allowing you to use common open chords to play songs in any key. A guitar in standard tuning ( E, A, D, G, B, e ) with a capo on the 3rd fret would now be in the 'tuning' of ( G, C, F, Bb, D, g ). A capo moves the pitch up a half-step for every fret that you go up. It's a pretty cool device if you ask me. So we've made it through our first few lessons and it only took 5 to get to playing some acutal music. I know it took some patience but we made it this far. I am trying to pace things out and make the lessons easy to digest and not totally scare off anyone. If you have any comments or suggestions on the pace or length of the lessons, or if you like things just as they are, please visit the Feedback page and send me your thoughts and comments. Thanks for all the interest you all have shown in the blog and I hope to see you all back for our next lesson when we take a look at barre chords.
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