Guitar For Beginners - Easy Minor Chords - Lesson 2

During our last lesson we learned a great finger exercise for warming up and getting your fingers used to holding down the strings and putting your fingers in the right place. Remember, it's important to always put your finger as close to the fret as possible without being on top! That is true for anything, whether you are playing single notes or playing chords. In the last lesson we also learned the E major and A major chord. These are the perfect starting chords because later on when we get into intermediate lessons those shapes will really come into play. It's also a lot of fun to play these chords as a beginner because the change isn't too difficult and they sound awesome.

It's important to understand a core concept about music that we'll cover a little bit today. As a beginner guitar player you should understand at least two basic chord qualities; major and minor. As I said we covered two major chords in lesson one and now we'll cover those same chords but the minor versions. We can get into what makes chords major or minor later on but for now you should train you ear to hear major as a happier brighter sounding chord, and minor as a darker sadder tone. So let's cover E and A minor now. First try E minor (Em)

So if you tried E major before you'll notice that making the chord minor just means taking your first finger off of the third string first fret. When you're playing this chords you can strum every string leaving all of them open (meaning let them ring using no fingers) except for the strings indicated in the diagram. This is a very full sounding chord that you can have a lot of fun with. Next try A minor(Am)

Now you should notice that this is the exact same shape as the E major chord but with each finger moved down a string. You may also recall that I recommend as a beginner to play A major with an open b string (second string). This is to illustrate the idea that E and A chords are mirror opposites. I also want you to split your chords up into chord pairs. So when you are practicing practice changing between chord pairs. The first pair you should practice is E major to A major. The next pair you should work on is E minor to A minor. Pairing chord changes together makes the changes easier to manage and has you playing consistently in key. Keep up the good work! Rock On!