The Skool of guitar excellence
RockSkool: Minor Chord Intro
Now we have discussed the 6 major chords. Let’s move onto learning 3 of the minor chords....
The theory behind the minor chord is this….
We count out the 1st, 3rd and 5th as before but we flatten the 3rd note.
For example…... in the scale of C,
(C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C)
the 3rd note is E,
so to “flatten” the E we move down one fret and get the note Eb or D# note
(see THEORY section for more detail)
This produces a “sad” sound and is used often in ballads and rock songs.
We will now look at three popular minor chords.
There are many other chord types that we have not included here. Although they are derived from these major chords most are quite complex, so at this stage we will only concentrate on the most popular and look at the variants later on. (thankfully you don’t really need them at this stage….phew!)
When you know how to play all these chords we will look at how they can be put together to form a chord progression. A chord progression is a number of chords, 2, 3, or 4 chords, played in a particular pattern and rhythm that go to make up a song.
We will look at a simple chord progression using the chords and learn to play some simple songs by playing a few chords in a particular order.
A good example to help understand this is the “AMAZING GRACE” song in the song book which shows the same song using 4 different chord progressions.
You will see the names of the chords are written above the notes on the tab to make it easier to understand at this stage.