Can you learn the 12 minor chords on the piano right now and know them forever? Why not?

Good morning, this is Duane Shinn, and today I’d like to talk about minor chords on the piano. You can learn all the minor chords really, really quickly if you just set your mind to it, and I’ll show you how easy it is.

First of all, minor chords are beautiful aren’t they? They have that haunting sound. (piano music) That sort of thing. Beautiful, beautiful sound.

Let’s find out what a minor chord is. It’s very, very simple if you don’t know it. A major chord, you know, is made out of a root third and fifth of a major scale. If you don’t know the major chords, I suggest that you look up my video on YouTube and learn the 12 major chords, because from the 12 major chords we’re going to form the minor chords very easily.

Just for review, though, the 12 major chords are C, F and G, which are all white, D, E and A, which have a black third, black middle note, D-Flat, E-Flat and A-Flat, which are like Oreo cookies, black on the outside, white on the inside.

Then there’s two left over, G-Flat, which is all black, and then B, B-Flat. See, B and B-Flat are mirror images of one another. One is white, black, black, the other is black, white, white.

So remember that, white-black-black, white-black-black, black-white-white, white-black-black, black-black and so on. And again, the formula for a major scale is whole step, whole step, half-step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half-step. If I take the root third and fifth of a major scale, that gives me a major chord for that key.

Now to make it minor, you simply lower the third a half-step. Where’s the third? That’s the root, that’s second, third, fourth, fifth, so I lower that a half-step. Lower means to go the left, so I’m flatting E. I’m going from E to E-Flat. That’s C Minor.

F, lower the third, minor. G Major, G Minor. D Major, D Minor. E Major, E Minor. A Major, A Minor. D-Flat Major, D-Flat Minor. In this case, we go from a white key to another white key because there’s no black key in there. If we’re going to lower the third a half-step, we have to move from that note F down to what looks like E, but technically you’d have to call it F-Flat.

The E-Flat Major chord, lower the third to G-Flat. A-Flat Major chord, A-Flat Minor chord, you lower C to C-Flat. The G-Flat Major chord, you lower the B-Flat to B-Double-Flat. The B chord, you lower the third from D-Sharp to D Natural. The B Flat chord, you lower the third from D to D-Flat.

You see how easy it is. It’s just a matter of lowering the third a half-step, whatever the chord is. Major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, miner, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor, major, minor.

Of course, the same thing is true in the left hand. If you can find a major chord, you can find a minor chord. Once you find all the minor chords, be sure and play around with them. They’re fun to play. (piano music.)

By the way, any chord can be inverted, can’t it? That’s D-Minor, so that is, too. I’m just standing D-Minor on its head, like if I turned you upside-down, you’d still be the same person, you’d just be you upside-down. Also, you can break up chords. They don’t have to be played all at once. You can arpeggiate them, break them up like that. Left hand, I like to break up chords like that. Leave a space down low, otherwise it sounds too muddy. That’s too muddy so I leave the third out and play that.

I encourage you to fool around in various minor chords. A good improvisation exercise is to just take two or three minor chords and make up a theme, a motif, and see what you can come up with. Let’s say that I pick the A-Minor chord. I’m going to play that in the left hand and in the right hand I’m going to just make up a theme, simple theme. (piano music) See what I did? I just used the same pattern up here as I did there, move from the A-Minor chord to the D-Minor chord. It’s real easy to get started improvising that way and I encourage you to do it.

Of course, I’m talking to beginners here. If you’re more advanced, you already know this stuff.

Thanks for being with me and we’ll see you tomorrow with another short, free video tip. We’ll see you there. Bye-bye for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84gA0_1VuqI
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