Walk into any adult ed guitar class or community band and hang around long enough you will undoubtedly hear the groans of realisation as a B minor chord pops its head over the horizon. There you are, happily strumming away and up it comes, appearing on the page in front of you like the ominous shadow of a Bond villain, letting you know that at some point in this song you are going to become unstuck. How you deal with this eventuality will depend on where you are on your learning journey. It is in all likeliness that you will fall into one of four camps.
Camp 1: You don’t know what a B minor chord is. You have not started learning barre chords so the mere premise of a B minor chord is beyond your scope of vision currently, which is absolutely fine, we have all been at that stage at some point. The good news is that there is no reason to have to play a B minor chord at this stage, there are ways around it. Keep reading.
Camp 2: You have looked at B minor chords, tried to learn how to do a barre chord a couple of times but have decided that your hand must be a different shape to everybody else’s so it's really not worth the time and effort. This is a widely held belief of many adult learners and some younger ones occasionally. I’m afraid that most of the time it is not true, your hand is exactly the same as everyone else's, it takes time to get your hand to manipulate itself into being able to achieve a barre chord. It is physical restriction as much as anything, it's not poor technique, it's teaching your muscles to do something they have not done before. But the good news is that you don’t have to play a barre chord at all*, they are not necessary. Keep Reading.
*Just a quick note to say: if you are having lessons and your teacher has told you to learn barre chords DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT go to your next lesson and say, ‘I read this thing on the internet and it has told me I don’t need to learn barre chords.’ Your teacher knows what they are doing, there is a reason why they are getting you to learn barre chords, go with it. The advice I give here is for practical playing situations, not your homework.
Camp 3: You have learnt the B minor chord, ish. You know how it is supposed to look, you know how it is supposed to sound, and on a good day when the wind is in the right direction you can, after a bit of a warm up, play what could conceivably be recognised as a B minor barre chord. Great. Keep at it, you will get there. But if, as mentioned briefly above, you are in a practical playing situation, like a community band or jam session, or you just want to play through a song without stopping to stretch then there are other avenues to explore. Keep practicing the barre chord, but treat it as a warm exercise and every so often try to throw it in, at some point you will get it, until then, try one of the solutions below. Keep reading.
Camp 4: B minor chords? No problem but don’t talk to me about F’s. If you are in Camp 4 then well done, you undoubtedly went through quite a lot of pain to get to where you are, if you didn’t, and barre chords came easily to you then either your memory is failing you or you are in the tiniest minority of players. But I encourage you to keep on reading, because you may still pick up some helpful information. For a start, variation is a key aspect of playing music, the version of B minor that you have learnt is probably the best option for some songs, but you may find other variations of a B minor fit well into different situations. Keep reading.
Of course, B minor is not exclusively a problem for guitarists, it is equally disliked by beginner mandolin and ukulele players for the most part, unlike other friends of B minor, like the F chord, which is often sworn at by guitarists but relatively loved by ukulele players.
So I am going to let you in on some secrets here, you rarely ever have to play B minor barre chord. Of course there will be situations that you may want to, like playing the rhythm to Hotel California for example, it is difficult to get that snappy off-beat feel without a barre chord but not impossible as we will cover. You go and watch some professional guitarists and just look at how often they actually bother playing a barre chord. It’s a bit of a paradox in the guitar world, because essentially you need to learn how to play barre chords so that you stop playing them. Similar to the paradox in songwriting and composition where it is important to learn the rules of music theory so that you can immediately break them when you write a song. All of which will be covered in future blog posts and in more detail, as I am aware that there will be some musicians out there who if they are reading this will now be shouting at the screen, possibly calling out ‘Witch! Witch!,’ and baying for my head. The point is, playing music should be enjoyable, not a struggle. I'm not saying don't strive to improve, just remember why you are doing this and if there are some reasonable short cuts to take that will make life easier and more enjoyable then take them.
It must be time to look at some practical solutions to the big B minor problem then. Here are four B minor solutions for you. Remember, the point of these solutions is to get you playing and to enjoy playing, so try them all if you like, or just try one and see how it goes. Whatever works for you is the right thing to do.
Solution One: Play a D chord.
That’s right, just play a D chord. It can’t really be that simple can it? Well, all of these solutions do have a slight caveat, which is that they work in some situations better than others. If you are playing in a group, particularly a large group or community band, then yes, it really is that simple. Should somebody comment on your use of a D chord where there would normally be a B minor then learn this phrase, ‘I’m playing chord tones.’ You don’t need to know what that means and it’s a good bet that they won’t.
You can play a D chord in place of a B minor chord because they are basically the same, as long as there is someone else you are playing with that is playing a B note of some kind then you are safe. Other instances where this idea can be useful is playing an A chord instead of an F#m and an E chord instead of a C#m.
Here’s the science bit. (Which you don’t need to know but some of you might like to know.) Basic chords are made up of three notes, a B minor chord is made up of a B, D and F# note being played together. A D chord is made up of a D, F# and an A note being played together. So you can see, two out of the three notes of both chords are the same as two out of the three notes in the other. The D and the F#. Imagine that you are playing alongside Barry the Bass player, he is playing the low B note and you are playing the D and F# notes. So together you are playing a B minor chord as the sound that is being produced is made up of B, D and F# notes. But as you are playing a D chord there is also an A note in the mix. So what happens to the B minor now we have added an A into the mix? Well, simply it becomes a Bm7 chord, which is a perfectly reasonable variation to use in most circumstances.
Solution Two: Play a Bm11thingy?
This one is more specifically for guitarists, but it has an underlying lesson that is applicable to any instrument, or at least strummed/stringed instruments. There is a chord that is very simple, so simple that it is just as easy as an Em chord. It has a complicated sounding name and that is Bm11 (B minor 11), but it is very simple to play. You do have to be mindful when playing this chord, in some situations strumming the full five strings (always try to avoid the low E if possible) will sound too open and confuse the sound. To counter this you can use string selection - which we shall be discussing in more depth shortly - by only playing the fifth, fourth and third strings. Here is the chord:
More science: In this chord you are playing a B, D and an A note, which is a Bm7 chord without the F#. Should you strum all five strings then you can add an E note to that list which is what makes it a Bm11, E being the eleventh note of the B Major scale. You do not need to know this to play it but a separate blog post to explain how you can have an eleventh note in a seven note scale will be happening.
This chord will work in place of a Bm in most cases, just be aware that this is an open chord with several open strings, so songs with a more defined or choppy rhythm (Hotel California for example) will not accept it as well as others.
Solution Three: The no-barre B minor.
This is the big one, the one to aim for. This is what many professional guitarists will play when they need to play a B minor chord. Obviously it depends largely on what they are playing, but certainly anything funk-like or bluesy would suit this chord very well. The premise is that in most situations you have another player providing the root note, most likely a bass player in a standard band setup. You leave the root note to them and you are playing the rest of the chord. This is, for all intents and purposes, a B minor barre chord just without the barre. Which makes it a very good chord to learn if you intend on learning the full barre chord at some point in the future.
It is also a good example of how string selection can be useful. What you are doing is playing a B minor barre chord but choosing not to play the sixth and fifth strings, and because you are not using them there is no reason for you to hold down the barre. You could take it further and just play the first, second and third strings, that would be a B minor chord but wouldn't sound as full.
There's no science needed here, it's all B, D and F# notes in different orders, so it's all a B minor chord however you look at it.
Solution Four: Use a capo
Is this controversial? I don't think so, but I have heard people say that using a capo to make your life easier is cheating and not what proper musicians do. That's rubbish, plenty of professional musicians use capos to make life easier when appropriate. But apart from that, why would you make life harder for yourself? Unless you are training to become the first violinist in the Royal Philharmonic then there is no need to make things difficult. You are likely learning to play an instrument for enjoyment and making life easier for yourself is surely a help. I'm not going to do a full rundown of the many different ways in which you can transpose chords using a capo, I'm just going to stick to a common one that can be used when a B minor comes knocking at your door.
B minor chords are most commonly found in songs that are in the key of G or D. By using a capo we can change the shapes of chords, the actual audible sound of the chords will stay the same, but by moving up the neck we change the shape needed to play that chord. As I said a moment ago, I will delve into this more deeply at some point in the future, for now, trust me. We are going to change the shapes to become the shapes of the chords in C Major. So you will play C, Dm, Em, Fmaj7, G and Am shaped chords. For the F you can play Fmaj7 which is an easier chord on a guitar.
Look at the song in question, if it is using a combination of the chords in G Major (G, Am, Bm, C, D an Em) then put your capo at 7th fret and play the corresponding shapes from C Major. A Bm chord then becomes and Em shape. In D with capo at 2nd fret the Bm becomes an Am shape. The disadvantage of this is that you have to transpose the whole song, but it might be worth it, particularly if you have a song that uses both a Bm and an F#m, nobody needs that kind of stress in their lives.
I guess the underlying point I am trying to get across here, is that when you come across a Bm, or anything else that might just seem like a currently arduous mountain to climb, don't push it to the side and ignore it, find another way around. In music there is always more than one way to achieve a goal and you just have to find the way that works for you.
Chris J Barber-Hopgood
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Good read.