What is a Minor Chord?

Minor chords are perhaps the second most popular chord in music, second only to major chords (as I suggested in my post on major chords here). Today's post is about how to make a minor chord.

As with major chords, there are a few good ways to describe minor chords:

1) Minor chords are sad sounding chords.
2) Major chords are the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of a minor scale.
3) A minor chord is composed of three notes: the first and second form a minor third interval, and the second and third form a major third interval.

If you're seeing a lot of similarities to my post on major chords (if you haven't read it, you should - just click here), you're a perceptive musician. The first description is often true, but not always (I think a Dm in the key of C doesn't always sound sad... but we'll take more about keys later).The third description requires some knowledge of intervals which you may not yet have (we'll talk about this later, too). So, again, for those of you who don't know intervals, I'm going to use the second description - the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of a minor scale - to teach you about minor chords.

Let's use an Am (read: "A minor") scale - A B C D E F G A - the easiest major scale. The 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of an Am scale are A, C, and E, respectively. So if you play A, C, and E together, you're playing an A minor (Am) chord!

Unlike with "major" chords, we never leave out the "minor" part when describing the chord

Well, that's not totally true. Sometimes musicians will simply say "A" instead of "A minor", but I consider it poor form. Why? Because it's not always clear when you say "A chord" (instead of "A minor chord") whether you'd want an A major chord or an A minor chord (I would assume A major). So always be clear when you want it to be a minor chord!

More than one of the same note is allowed

Just like with major chords, you can have the same note in different octaves. Your Am chord can have as many As, Cs, and Es as you want, just make sure to have at least one of each.

As an example, the first Am chord most people learn on guitar has the following notes, from fifth string (A) to first string (high E): A E A C E. If you accidentally (or purposely) play the low E string as well, then you're just adding another E to get E A E A C E.

The lowest note (in terms of pitch) of the chord is often the "root" of the chord (but not always!)

Much like a major chord, we often make the lowest note of the chord the root (so for an A minor, the lowest note would be an A). Sometimes we want a different note as our "bass note", but usually it's the root.

Let's sum up what we've learned about minor chords:

1) Minor chords are the 1st, 3rd, and 5th note of a minor scale. 
2) You can include the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the same minor scale in a different octave (if you want to play more than 3 notes in your chord).
3) No other notes allowed! (so don't try to sneak an F# into your Am unless you want a completely different sounding chord!)

You now should know how to make a minor chord (and a major chord, if you read the post on major chords), so congrats! You're now well on your way to understanding how chords work, since a lot of chords are in fact based on either minor or major chords.