Major or minor: the one thing worth hearing in the first week
Two chords on the same root note: one bright, one shaded. One finger tells them apart.
Adrian9 minupdated
In the first week you will not hear that a chord is too bright or that the bass sits too low. One thing you do hear straight away, before you know its name: two chords standing next to each other share the same note underneath, and one of them is brighter while the other sounds shaded. That is the difference between major and minor, and it is worth catching early, because it comes back in every song.
The same root note, two moods
A major chord and a minor chord with the same name share the root note and the fifth. One note in the middle tells them apart, the third: in the major chord it sits four semitones above the root, in the minor one three. One fret less and the chord goes darker.
That is the physics of it, which is why you do not have to remember it as a mood. It is enough to know that between the two notes you hear at the bottom and the top of a chord there is a third one, and that third one decides. The books call it, right after the root, the most important note in any chord.
In the fingers it is one note, not a new grip
On a guitar this shows better than in any diagram of theory. Three pairs of grips you either know already or will meet in the first week differ by one note, on one string.
| pair | what changes | what the hand does |
|---|---|---|
| A → Am | second string (B) | a finger moves from the second fret to the first |
| E → Em | third string (G) | you lift one finger, the string rings open |
| D → Dm | first string, the thinnest | a finger moves from the second fret to the first |
This is practical news rather than theory: the minor version of a grip you already know is not a new grip to learn from scratch. It is the same shape with one finger moved by a fret or taken off. If you can play E, you can already play Em.
The proof on one string: D, Dsus4, Dm
Take the D grip and leave everything alone except the thinnest string. On the second fret you have D major, and one fret down, on the first, you get Dm. Go one fret up instead, to the third, and you have Dsus4, a chord with no third in it at all.
Play those three in a row and ask yourself the same question each time: bright or shaded. For the first two the answer arrives by itself. For the third one nothing arrives, because the one note that decides is missing. It is the shortest proof I know and it takes ten seconds.
How to practise it by ear
Ear: chords starts exactly here. This is how level 1 describes itself: “The same root note, two moods. You do not need the chord name, it is enough to hear whether it is bright or shaded.” There are two answers, and after a miss the exercise tells you how to spot it: “A major third at the bottom, hence the brightness.”
Add one rule from Fujita, the best sentence about ears I have read: sing first, play second. Before you click an answer, try to hum the middle of the chord. An ear that finds that note with a voice will recognise it later in a song, and an ear that only guesses will recognise nothing.
The same author splits practice into two things, foundation and songs, and insists the foundation gets its own ten minutes a day. Ear work belongs to the foundation. One series of questions takes less time than a warm-up, so there is nothing here to put off until the weekend, and the ear learns slower than the fingers anyway, while that progress does not show from outside.
Why we do not say “happy or sad”
That shortcut is everywhere and I fell for it myself. For the first month I looked for sadness in songs instead of for a note, and I missed regularly. The books that use it back away from it in the same chapter: “In My Life” by the Beatles is a sad song sitting in a major key.
Whether a song sounds happy is decided by more than a third: tempo, genre, instruments, the way it is sung. So the question is bright or shaded, not happy or sad. The two answer buttons in the exercise use the everyday words, but the sentence above them says what to listen for.
What this is for in the first week
Two things at once. First, you start to hear the moment a minor chord walks into a song, and that is usually the bar people like most in it. Second, the chord sheet stops tricking you: Polish and other European songbooks write a small letter for minor, so “a” means Am while “A” means A major, and those are two different chords. An ear that hears the difference does not miss it on paper.
The step after the third is intervals, the distances between single notes, and you learn those through songs you already know. That is a separate topic, for another week.
What confused me
I assumed a minor chord was a separate grip to be learnt like a new word. When I saw E and Em next to each other I felt cheated: it is the same grip with one finger missing. I had spent a week practising something I already knew.
The second stumble was in the ear: I kept waiting for the minor chord to sound sad, and it just sounded ordinary, only darker. Once I stopped looking for an emotion and started looking for the shade, the hits went up the same evening.
Do this now
Ear: chords, level 1 (Major or minor).
The exercise plays chords in pairs on the same root note: A and Am, D and Dm, E and Em. You do not need the name, it is enough to hear whether it is bright or shaded.
Goal: 8 hits out of the 10 questions in a series.
Play this
three songs for one earO Come, All Ye Faithful carries both A and Am, the same root note in both flavours, and it needs no barre. God rest you merry gentlemen is shaded from the first bar, because it sits down on Am. Hickory Dickory Dock is a bright nursery tune where Am and Em each turn up once, so you can hear the shade arrive and leave.
» I can hear that something changed, but I cannot say which chord it was.
You do not need to in the first week. Names come later and have a level of their own: only the second one asks for C, F and G by name. Stay with bright or shaded until eight out of ten come out right, and move up after that.
Read more
- Guitar WisdomTomo Fujita · chapter 4, “Train Your Ear”It holds the rule “sing first, then play” and the one string, one finger exercise that the whole of ear training starts from.
- Guitar Fretboard MasteryNicolas Carter · part 4, “Triad chords” and “sus2 and sus4”The author shows how we know the third decides everything: he takes a chord without one, and the question about mood stops having an answer.
- Beginner Guitar Chords in Theory and PracticeSean Laughton · chapters “Intervals: Unlocking Chord Emotion” and “The Relative Minor Chord”You get the semitone counts inside both thirds, and the reason a minor chord sounds like a darker twin of the major one.
- Major and minorWikipediaThe page gives the definition through the third and adds the honest caveat that tying minor to sadness is cultural rather than something written into the sound.
- musictheory.net lessonsRicci AdamsThere are free lessons called “Generic Intervals” and “Triads”, and you can click through them without a guitar.
- teoria.com exercisesJosé Rodríguez AlviraGo there for free ear training exercises with no adverts, if you want the same material in a second tool.