Lauren Bateman, a guitar instructor, responds to a student question about the difference between major and minor chords. She gives an audible demonstration (A major vs A minor), states the basic characterization (major = bright/happy, minor = dark/sad), and says she will explain the music-theory reason—primarily the role of the third—progressing from basic to a bit more in-depth.
Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. In this video, I'm going to be answering a question from a student. They asked Lauren, you know, what is the difference between a minor and A major? We hear these things, minor chords, major chords, what's the difference? So I'm going to try and explain a little bit of that in this video here.
Now, I'm not going to make this into a full depth music theory type experience, but we're gonna have to do some music theory for you guys to understand it. So I'm gonna start at the most basic of what the difference between minor and major is. And then I'm gonna get a little bit more in depth as the video goes on. So we're gonna build on these concepts. So the first thing that you have to remember is that a major chord is happy, all right? And a minor chord is sad. That is the most basic, I guess, determination between major and minor. I'm gonna explain why in a second, but first, I just want you to hear the difference. If I play an A major chord, sounds like this, right?
Very bright, very upbeat. If I play an A minor chord, it's very dark, it's very mysterious, very sad sound.
So that's major again, bright and happy, kind of dark and mysterious on the minor. So what's the difference? What is causing such big change in sound? There's basically a difference of one note in these two chords. And that's what's creating such a difference in the sound that we're hearing. All of it. One note. That's it. Hey, guys, real quick. I hope you're enjoying the information in this video. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, so that you'll see when I release more videos just like this one. Let's get back into the lesson. If you see on my chord here, actually, I'm going to make the chord this way with my pinky. So you can see the note I'm changing is on the B string, okay? No other note changes. It's just on the B string. And we call this note as a very, very special name. It is the third. It is the third in music. So the difference between A minor and A major is a flat third or a minor third interval. Now, Lauren, oh my gosh, you're throwing out all these crazy terms. Don't worry about it. I'm going to explain it real quick. So we have in music these intervals. And all I want you to know at this stage is that an interval is the distance between notes for Example, if we have the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A to B. Okay, that's that going from A to B. B is the second note. It's a second interval. Okay? That's all you need to know. So what we're going to talk about is the actual difference now between this A major chord and this a minor chord. And this works with all chords. Major minor. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this lesson. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up. This way YouTube knows to show this video to more users just like you. So let's get back into the video. And in scales, you may have seen my video on the major scale. If not, I'll put a lesson video up here so you guys can go check that out. I went over, I believe, the C major scale and I may have also done the A major scale. We're going to talk about the scale here. So when we talk about an A major scale, I'm just going to talk about the first five notes. The first note is an A. The second note is a B. Listen to what I'm going to say next. The third, the third note is A C sharp. The fourth note is a D, and the fifth note is an E. All right, third, remember that first note is A. Second note is B. The third is C sharp. Our A major chord is made up of the first note, the third note, and the fifth note. So you. So if you look at my diagram up here, you'll see that an A major chord has the letters A or the notes A, C sharp and E. That's what makes an A major chord. Now, the difference in A minor scale, so we're going to talk about A minor now, is that we have a flat third. So the first note is going to be A. The second note is going to be B. C. Same so far. The flat third or the minor third is going to be C instead of C sharp. So you see, we've only changed one note here, at least in these first five notes that we're going to talk about here. So if you look at my diagram, you'll see that A minor chord is the letters in the notes A, C and E. So again, the only note that changed was going from C sharp to C natural. Okay, C sharp in A major. C natural in A minor. What did we do? We flatted the third. Think of flat. We're making it lower like a flat tire. That's what I always tell people. So the difference between a major chord and a minor chord is not only that A major chord sounds happy and a minor chord sounds sad. The, the biggest difference is that the third note is flat, all right? And it doesn't have to be with a. You can do this with any chord, alright? But you do have to have a little bit of an understanding of the scales and how things work. Music theory wise to get into this stuff more intricately. But on the most basic level, if all you get out of this video is that minor chords are sad and major chords are happy. And the reason for that, what causes this difference, this major difference in sound, is that the third, the third note in the chord is a minor interval. It is a flat third. Get used to hearing that. You're going to hear that a lot in music, especially if you start getting more and more into music theory. The flat third is what causes this giant difference between a minor sound and a major sound. So there you go. That is the answer to what's the difference? Or the most basic answer to what's the difference between a minor and a major.
