A minor

About A minor

The scale of A minor runs A – B – C – D – E – F – G, and the key has no sharps or flats. Those seven notes are the raw material of everything on this page: each chord below is stacked from them alone, which is why the chords of A minor fit together so naturally.

In A minor you will mostly hear Am, Dm and E. The natural minor scale would make the fifth chord minor, but players nearly always raise the seventh note to G♯, which turns it into E (or E7 with a seventh) and gives the key its strong pull home.

A minor shares every note with C major, its relative key, so the two have the same signature and the same seven chords. If the chords of a piece fit both lists, listen for the chord it starts and ends on to decide which key you are in. Not to be confused with A major, the parallel key on the same home note.

Minor keys have three common forms of their scale: natural, harmonic (with the raised seventh, G♯) and melodic. The table shows the natural chords and, below them, the chords borrowed from the harmonic form: E, E7 and the diminished seventh.

Guitarists like A minor: 5 of its chords have easy open shapes, so you can play most progressions here without a single barre chord.

A good way to learn A minor: play the chords up the scale, then pick two progressions from this page and loop them for a few minutes with a metronome, first at 60 BPM, then faster.