Hey, how you doing? Justin here,
back with you for a look at minor chords.
I'm sure many of you have heard about minor chords, right?
You've heard of them,
somewhere along your way, you've heard about major and minor.
Maybe you've heard that major chords are happy,
and minor chords are sad, that minor keys have got a sad feeling.
And they're not far from the truth.
We're gonna look at it a bit deeper than that, though.
The first chord we'll look at, and I wanna play for you, is an E major chord.
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You should all be very familiar with that now.
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To make it a minor chord, we're gonna lift off our 1st finger.
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We'll talk more in detail about playing this chord in a second.
I mainly want you to listen.
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So, here's major...
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and here's minor.
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There's definitely a kind of sadness there, in a minor key.
Sometimes they can be deceiving. If you just hear one on your own,
and you're not used to doing any ear training,
or recognizing major and minor chords, you might start to mistake them.
That can take a little bit of practice.
But definitely when you play the major chord followed by the minor chord,
you can usually hear one's happy, and one's sad.
That's worth paying attention to.
Now, it might first seem that we're playing 6 notes when we play a chord,
especially when we're strumming all 6 strings,
but actually there's only 3 notes, and some of them are doubled.
For our E chord, we're actually playing, E, B, E, G#, B and E.
So it's actually only E, G# and B are the notes in an E major chord.
But some of them have been doubled. Again that was E, B, E, G#, B, E.
Now, some of you might have noticed, that the G# note only appeared once.
Okay? On...
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the 3rd string.
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And that's the note, that when we flatten it...
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it changes to minor. So we've changed this G# note...
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to a G note.
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Now, it's not always the case that just one note will move on a guitar,
to change a chord from a major chord to a minor chord,
but it is quite often the case,
and it is with the basic open minor chords that we're going to be looking at,
in this beginner course.
So, just to prove the theory here, I'm just gonna show you quickly,
the A major chord...
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and then the A minor chord.
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You can see actually it's just this note...
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changing to this note. ♪
There's A major.
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There's A minor.
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One we're not looking at this week, but D...
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to D minor.
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Again, it just has this one note change.
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There's a couple of takeaways I want you to get from this,
that'll help you remember all your chords.
First of all, the minor chords we're learning in this Beginner Course,
they're only one note different to the major chords.
Okay? The fingering is often going to look a little different,
but the actual note, the dots themselves,
are only gonna have one note difference between
E major and E minor, A major and A minor,
and D major and D minor.
And the second thing I want you to catch,
is the sound of the chords themselves.
I want you to start to recognize the sound, the character of a major chord,
and the sound of a minor chord, the character, the personality.
Cos if you start to recognize them,
it'll save you making any disastrous mistakes, if you're reading a chord chart,
and somebody's forgotten to write 'm' on there, next to the chord,
and you play a major instead of a minor, your ear should pick you up and go,
"Oh, hang on, this is the wrong one. This should be a minor chord".
That level of internal understanding of musicianship,
I think could be a really useful thing, even really at the beginner stage.
The other thing I should mention quickly is, where minor isn't written,
we assume major.
So, if you just see E written, you would assume it's E major.
If you see Em or E min, M-I-N, or E minor,
you would play a minor chord.
It's written all of those different ways.
Just a little lower case 'm', M-I-N dot usually, like short for minor,
or the full term minor is often written out, as well.
So, now in this lesson, we're just going to be checking out E minor and A minor,
and in a future lesson, we'll be checking out D minor,
cos it's a bit more tricky.
Better to get to grips with E minor and A minor, first of all.