Hi, how'ya doing, Justin here!
Welcome to Minor Chord Scale Relations!
And in this lesson we're going to be looking at the relationship of the
C maj scale to the chords A min, E min and D min; which are the 3 chords
in the key of C. We're gonna look at it exactly the same way as we looked at
the major chords in the C Major scale,
So, let's get to a close-up and check out how to do this.
So, just very quickly, we're gonna revise the C major scale, so we have this:
G, F, E, D, C, B, A, G, F, E, D, C, B, A, G, F and E.
♪
So, the chords that we're looking at today: the 1st one is Am (♪)
And now we're looking at how to play that scale kind of based around
our Am chord. So we have here: G (♪) - just with the little finger, nice, easy one (♪)
to get the F note, our 1st finger has to just lay over (♪)
and then back to normal for our E note.
♪
On the 2nd string, little finger just goes down on the 3rd fret
to get our D note, lifts off to regular for our C note and 1st finger lifts off
to get the note B (♪). Next string: we just play the regular note for A, lift it off for G.
♪
Now, we don't tend to use these other ones as much, but we've
also got F, E, D. We can't really play the C there, because it interrupts with
the A root note, so: ♪ That's generally all of the ones we play.
We don't tend to play those: ♪ Well, that's worth knowing to...
you might wanna do a little run-down like that sometime: ♪. It sounds kind of funky.
♪
Just explore it. Just like I'm doing now:
♪
And see the way that the scale and the Am chord kinda lock together.
So, the 2nd chord that we're looking at today is E minor: (♪). Now, generally, for this
particular one you wanna be using be your 2nd and 3rd fingers, but there's
other options, as you know with the E minor chord, you can play it with any
2, kinda consecutive fingers and you're gonna be fine. But because our melody:
♪
is here, it makes sense to use the middle two fingers. So, of course,
little finger, 1st finger, open, little finger, 1st finger, open,
little finger on the A, open, little finger, if you're gonna go this far
on the F, E, lift it off for D, put it back on for C, lift it off for B, open.
♪
Don't tend to: (♪) Although of course: (♪)
just like the A minor:
♪
Just have a bit of an experiment. That's all I'm asking you to do,
is to play around with the relationship (♪) between this scale and the chord of Em
Now, there's one more minor chord to look at, it's the D minor
Now, D minor in open position with the C major scale's a little bit awkward,
because it's only using the thinnest 4 strings, anyway. So, we can get (♪)
We've got that much.
♪
But we don't tend to use...'cos it uses... Has to require some kind of pretty weird
stretching things to get there. So, generally, you'd wanna do
D min using your 1st, 2nd and 3rd fingers, little finger down for the note G, off for F,
1st finger off to get to the E. On the 2nd string: we've already got
the note D, 1st finger on the C, open for the B.
♪
And then, we've got that:
♪
I'll be honest, I tend to avoid this chord because there's no...
♪
Unless I'm just doing those kind of simple
♪
There's, you know, there's different ways of playing the melodies there, but
♪
there's not that many as there are for the other chords.
There we have the chord-scale relationships between the C major scale,
our Am, Em and Dmin chords. Like I've mentioned before, really what I want you
to do, is just experiment a little bit. See the way that the scale
fits with the chord shapes. That's really important to be
able to understand this idea; there's a lot of, lot of ground that this covers.
When you understand the relationship between the chords and the scales and
the way you can put it together, you get all sorts of interesting chords, you get
the ability to play melody, there's all sorts of things that this kinda leads to.
We're gonna be exploring some of that. But this is one of those lessons that
for the future of your guitar playing is gonna really make a difference. Even if
it doesn't seem to be right now. This is a biggin. There's a lot of interesting stuff
going on here, so do spend a bit of time with it and I'm sure you'll gonna enjoy
the next lesson, where we're going to learn how to put all of these
major and minor chord scale relationships along with our folk fingerstyle patterns,
to play the Australien classic song: Waltzing Matilda.
And I'll see you for that very soon. Take care of yourselves, bye-bye!