Minor chords are characterized by a sad or sorrowful sound, and they add a lot to a chord progression. I am going to dig into a bit of music theory to help you better understand minor chords, and how to use them.
Let’s take a major chord and turn it into a minor chord - We’ll start with a G chord. The G chord is made up of three notes - G, B and D; these notes are also the first, third and fifth notes of a G scale. A minor chord is formed by flatting the third, or lowering the third by a half step. So a Gm or G minor chord consists of G, Bb and D.
When you play in the key of G, the most commonly used major chords are G, C and D - but what is the most common minor chord in the key of G? That chord is E minor (Em) - of course there is a reason why Em is the most common. The sixth note of the G major scale is E - it’s minor chord is called the relative minor. Em is the relative minor because the Em scale has the same notes as the G scale.
As with the major chords - there are different ways to form minor chords. Let’s take a look at Em first; it is composed of three notes: E, G and B. In this case you only need to fret two strings, the 1st and 4th at the second fret. these two notes are both E and the open strings are G and B.
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