Now that we have figured out how to play any major triad chord, lets figure out how to play any minor chord. In this tutorial I will show you an easy trick to play any minor triad.
Playing any minor chord on a piano is as simple as counting to 3. And then counting to 4. I call this the 3,4 rule.
To start, we need to know the root note. Thankfully, the root note will always be in the name of the chord. For example: in a C Minor chord, the root note would be C. In a G Minor chord, the root note would be G. Now that we figured out how to determine the root note we can move on to find our minor third, or in other words, our second note in the chord.
If we take a C Minor chord. “C’ will be the root note. Now we will count up 3 half steps from the root note. A half step is the smallest musical interval between two adjacent notes in a 12-tone scale. For example: Going from C to C♯ would be considered going up a half step. We need to do this 3 times from C to get the second note (also called a minor third) in a C Minor chord.
we count up 3 half steps from the root note to get our minor third. In a C Minor chord, that note is Eb.
Now that we have found our minor third, lets go ahead and find our perfect fifth (our third note in the chord to complete the triad). To do this we count up 4 half steps from our minor third (Eb).
we now count up 4 half steps from the second note (minor third) to get our perfect fifth. In this case that note is G.
Now play all that together. You’ve just created a C Minor chord (C-Eb-G). To test the 3,4 rule even further, watch the video below to see how this work’s with any minor triad. Then play around on a piano/keyboard yourself.