Playing the relative minor

Hi there! Today I want us to look at a song that starts with a minor chord. The movement we will look at is as follows:

6-4-2-7-3

This will be repeated over and over, but we will cover different ways of playing this movement. If you are a beginner, I would recommend you look at my previous article where I started out explaining minor chords.

This lesson is for the intermediate and more advance student. So I've created a simple song as an example which you can watch as well as the breakdown of the chord movements which is separate. For those who love to read, the chord movements will follow after the video lessons.

First the song:

Now for the breakdown of the chords:

OK, so for those who want to read through the article, let's start by looking at the scale and the number system. The major key is Eb:

Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C-D-Eb

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-1

So as shown above the movement is very simple. We will look at playing the movement, but we will also add two passing chords that will make it sound more fuller in a band. Remember we are covering two hand chords as the bass will cover the root notes. So the first chord is on the 6. It can be played a few different ways. Lets look at each one:

Please note that you can play any of the above shown chords when you land on the 6 chord. Look at the video example  how you can implement this chord.

Next we move to the 4 chord movement. There's also a few ways that you can play this chord. Let's see: 

Now we move to the 2 chord which is on F. Here it is:

Remember that you can play any of the Ab chords in the 4 chord movements on the 2 as well. It shares the same chords because it is the 6 of Ab.

Next we move on to a 7-3-6 progression. Technically because we are in a minor, it should be seen as a 2-5-1 ending on a minor, not major. But because we are viewing the minor in terms of it's major key, we will see it as the 7-3-6. 

Before we play the 7, we can play a 1 chord passing. This one chord is technically the 6 chord of F#. This is how it looks: 

If you listen to the song, you can see how to implement this movement. 

Now we are ready to move to the 7 chord. There are 2 ways we can play the 7 chord. Please note that the first 7 chord example, follows the 1 chord passing above. It can only work in this way. Let's see how it looks: 

The second way to play the 7 chord will not work so well with the 1 passing of above. You should play this chord, alone. Here it is:

Now for the last chord in this movement-the 3 chord. There are also two different ways of the 3 chord. The first way can be expanded as well. We will cover this first. The basic chord is as follows:

Now we can do a movement on the right hand while you keep the left hand the same. The first is a melody to get to the chord. The melody goes from F-G. Secondly,we have the actual chord as explained above. Thirdly we have the following chord on the RH

The fourth move on the RH is...

Then the fifth one...

All these chords can be played over the 3 chord movement. This concludes the basic progression. 

Next we will add two passing chords. One is before we get to the 4 chord and the other is before we play the 2 chord. Firstly, we can add a 1 chord passing to get to the 4 chord as follows:

If you want, you can do a walk up with your left hand before you play the chord, like this (Please look at the video for this to be fully grasped):

Another way to play this chord is like this:

Next we move to the second passing that we can play. This is added before you play the 2 chord. You can play the 6 passing chord to get to the 2. You can any of the different 6 chord movements I previously covered in the above section or you could play this as well:

That's is! I'm sure that this will help you a lot in terms of advancing as a piano or keyboard player. Please don't forget to subscribe to my email list on the top right hand side and my Youtube channel. That way you will receive my weekly updates.

I hope you had fun with this!