Hassocks Guitar, Bass & Music Theory Lessons

If you're looking for private guitar lessons, bass guitar lessons or music theory lessons then I'm a guitar instructor in Hassocks covering Mid Sussex so please contact me today!

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Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar, save perhaps two

Fredric Chopin

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One of the biggest thrills for me, still, is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen

Paul McCartney

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From major to minor

You might have heard these musical terms before but perhaps don’t know exactly what they mean: major, minor, sharp and flat. Many people, when beginning their guitar lessons journey, will learn a few chords. Your first chords will probably include D, E, A, E minor and A minor. While these chords can be played on a piano or keyboard and sound much the same, on guitar, most people learn them visually - e.g. D is a little triangle of fingers, A is a straight line - and we don’t tend to get into the significance of the names until later. However, it can cause some confusion early on. Recently, one of my pupils asked me if D flat was the same thing as D minor so I thought I would explain the difference. In effect, we’re actually talking about two very different things in D flat and D minor.

Imagine a piano. The large keys on a piano are traditionally white, with slightly smaller black keys tucked in between them. The white notes are A, B, C, D, E, F and G and the black notes are “sharps” or “flats”. The black note between A and B can be called either A sharp or B flat because it is one note higher than A (hence A sharp) but also one note below B (hence B flat). If you trace the notes from the bottom of the piano upwards you’ll notice that every now and then two white keys appear together with no black key between them. These pairs of white notes are B and C, E and F. There is no B sharp or C flat or E sharp or F flat - at least, not for the purposes of this blog!

So, what’s a D flat? The answer: it’s the black note one step down from D. We might also think of it as C sharp as it’s one step up from C. D flat might also mean a D flat chord or, to give it its full name, D flat major.*

D minor therefore doesn’t sound like the name of a note, it’s the name of a chord. On guitar, if you consider where you would put your fingers for a D minor, it is not very far removed from a D major. More on why that might be another time!

* If we’re talking about a D chord, a C chord, a G chord or, indeed, a D flat chord then remember any chord expressed this way - i.e. without any additional information like minor, diminished or augmented after it - is short-hand for “major chord” so the full names would actually be D major, C major, G major and so on.