Em and Am: the easy way in
Okay. Everything so far has been one string, one finger, one clean note. Today you get to make an actual chord. Two of them, in fact, and they're related enough that learning one basically teaches you the other.
Em first.
E minor
E minor uses two fingers. That's it. Two.
Put your second finger on the A string, second fret. Put your third finger on the D string, second fret. Strum all six strings.
That's the whole chord. Nothing on the low E, nothing on the high E, nothing on the G or B strings. Open. Ringing. You barely did anything and it already sounds like something.
Check your fingers are curled up and out of the way of the strings next to them. If your third finger is flopped over and touching the G string, you'll get a dead thud instead of a ring. Press behind the fret, like we talked about a couple lessons back. Not on top of it.
Strum it slow, one strum at a time, and listen. If a string sounds muted or buzzy, look at what's touching it. Usually it's a finger leaning where it shouldn't.
A minor
Now Am. Same two fingers, plus one more.
Second finger on the D string, second fret. Third finger on the G string, second fret. First finger on the B string, first fret.
Strum everything except the low E string. So five strings, starting from the A string down.
This one's a little more crowded because now you've got three fingers stacked close together on adjacent strings. That's super common to fumble at first. Take it slow. Place one finger, check it, place the next, check it, then strum.
Why these two first
Em and Am share two fingers doing the exact same shape, just shifted over one string. That's not an accident, that's just how the guitar is built, and it's the first time you'll notice that these chords aren't random shapes you're memorizing one at a time. There's a system under here. You're going to see that pattern again and again as we go.
Switching between them
Here's the actual skill today. Not the shapes, the switching.
- Fret Em. Strum it once.
- Move to Am. Strum it once.
- Back to Em.
Do that slowly, maybe one switch every two or three seconds at first. Don't rush it. The goal isn't speed, it's a clean chord landing every single time you switch. A messy fast switch teaches your hand the wrong thing. A clean slow switch teaches it the right thing, and speed comes later basically for free.
I'd rather you spend three weeks getting clean changes than one week getting fast sloppy ones. That's not me being precious about it, that's just how the hand actually learns. The apps that promise you a full song in a week skip this part, and then people wonder why they sound bad. You don't sound bad. You're just standing on the boring part, which is the part that lasts.
A note on stringing this together with strumming
Don't worry about strumming patterns yet. Right now you're doing one strum per chord, evenly, like a metronome in your head. Down, land, down, land. We'll get into rhythm patterns in a later lesson. Today is just: can your hand find the shape, land clean, and move to the next shape without your brain having a small emergency.
A quick aside on stringing your guitar right, while we're on the subject of getting basics right
My neighbor Brock brought his guitar over one afternoon with the strings on flat backwards, wound the wrong way around the tuning post, because he'd followed some blurry video online. Sounded almost right, tuned almost right, and it was just wrong enough to make everything harder than it needed to be. We fixed it in the driveway in about twenty minutes.
I bring it up because it's the same lesson as today, honestly. Small mechanical details matter more than they seem like they should. A finger half an inch off, a string wound the wrong direction, either one and the whole thing fights you for no reason you can see. Get the mechanics right and the guitar stops fighting.
We'll do a whole lesson on restringing later, hands-on, no video, because that video method almost never works and I'd rather show you in person.
Before next time
Ten minutes a day. Tune first, then Em, then Am, then switch between them slow and clean, maybe twenty times each session. Don't chase speed yet, chase a chord that lands clean every time you get there.