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more minor licks

1,256 views · Published 10 February 2016 · 11:39 · Indexed 6 November 2026

Channel: New Secret Guitar Teacher · 2016 · Music

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How to play licks over minor chords - part 2. Minor licks for guitar. Licks in minor key. Licks you can play over minor chords.

From the Secret Guitar Teacher Site: http://secretguitarteacher.com/youtube/ssb.php?lp_id=1155

Video script:
In the last Sound Bite we looked at a couple of ideas based around the Em and Am chord shapes. Now I want to show you one more shape that I find useful to create licks over Minor chords. This is based on the Cm shape.
 
Now actually we don't often play the open Cm chord  because frankly it's a bit awkward to finger and most of the time you get a better result using the Am shaped barre chord instead. But as a movable shape the Cm has a number of useful properties. Let's take a look at the diagram.                                             

To help us understand the make up of this shape I am starting, in the diagram on the left, with the C major chord - something we are all nice and familiar with. Now look at the left hand diagram and you can see that to get from C major to C minor I have made two changes. 
 
 The 3rd note in the C scale E has to move down a semitone to become the flatted third Eb. Easy enough to do that with the E note of the 4th string, but of course the Open E can't be lowered any further  So, in this case I have replaced it with the G note at fret 3 on the top string, doublng up on                     
the fifth note in the chord instead  you can see why I don't often try and play this as an open chord.

However, when we take the open G string into account, we can see a useful little triangle shape on tstrings 2,3 and 4. And when we add in the other two notes on the fifth and top strings we get the shape I refer to as the 'flying Vee'. At least that's what the shape makes me think of!

In the same way as sliding from minor 3rd to major third works over a major chord, we get a nice effect using the slide from 2nd to minor third with minor chords and we can also bring this 5th note off the top string into our licks as well.

Another trick with this shape is to sweep pick it.This is where we simply play all the notes with the pick going straight across the strings, jumping over the top one and coming back in one movement. 

You can get quite a nice effect by pairing up the notes on adjacent strings and playing them as a series of sliding double stops. This particularly suits finger style players.                                                                    

Ok, so we have focused in on three sets of CAGED system shapes here - the Em shape ... the Am shape ...and now the Cm shape. So now here's a couple of runs that help you join all these together.

And again, the secret to how these work is to focus in on the slide from 2nd to minor 3rd in each octave. The first run starts on the root note on the sixth string. Notice that this run links the Em shape to the Cm shape and then the top end of the Am shape  Here's the tab:


As it's not always convenient to start a run off the 6th string, here's a similar run that starts on the 5th string root. This links the Am shape to the Em shape.

Finally, note that between these 3shapes and 2 runs you have an approach to playing minor chords that will cover the whole fret board, no matter what minor chord you are playing over

Hope you have enjoyed this little mini-series on chord based licks. In the next lesson we'll be putting our attention back on the picking hand and going over the basics of something called Travis picking.

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