Building the C Minor Chord on the Guitar

Video Transcript

"MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. Now, we're going to take a look at our C minor chord. It's pretty similar to our C major if you recall back from our scale degree segment. The only difference between a major and a minor chord is we take our 3rd scale degree and we make it flat or we put it down one fret. So, you'll see here we have the same series of notes; we've got a C, E, now it's an E flat though, G, and C. And what we did is we actually did--we took it down and we dropped it back just one fret. And if you look at our scale degrees here, I'm sure you'll see the same concept that was our 1, C, and then the next string down we've got our flat 3. If you noticed here, I put the flat in front of the 3, or this one we're using the letter name itself, I put the flat afterwards. And that's how we say it. So, we'd say E flat or flat 3. And our 5 and our 1, those are all going to be in the same place, our 1s and our 5s, it's just that flat 3 that changes. And then when we play this chord too, we're going to have to play a little bit differently than, if you recall, just our normal C major shape. In this case, we'd actually want to take our fourth finger to play the C here and then we're going to take our first to play the E flat and we still have the open G and then we're going to use our second finger to play that C. So, it's going to look like this. And you can hear that minor quality to it; that flat 3rd really gives it a different feel. And in this case, we're also not going to be playing the high E string because we can't make that flat; it's the lowest that string goes."