Building the E 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 E minor chord, review the notes, look at the scale degrees, and look at how we would play that on guitar. So, again, our E major, we've got the note G sharp. That's going to be our 3rd. For the E minor, we just take it down; we'll make it flat, which brings it to a G natural in this case. Looking at the notes, we see that instead of having our G sharp here on the 3rd string, we just have our G natural which is our open string which makes that convenient for us. It's one of the easiest chords to play which is great for a guitar. So, again reviewing, we've got E, that's our 1, B, E, 5, 1, and G, that's now our flat 3, B and E again, reviewing. Those are all the same notes. Looking at the scale degrees, that's the same order just written out in scale degrees. And, again, we really want to be able to think of all of those so that way we can manipulate between playing the major and the minor of the chord without having to do too much work. We know that we're just moving one note. Now, playing this as you can imagine is pretty simple to our E major. It's almost the same exact shape except instead of having our index finger here pressed on the 1st fret of that 3rd string, we just leave it off, in this case, leave it as the G natural. So now when we play it, we've got the notes E, B, E, G, B, E, or in scale degrees 1, 5, 1, 3, 5, 1. That's E minor."