Hey Friend,

The IIm chord in the key of A major is B minor. The last time we saw B minor, it was acting as the VIm chord. In both cases, as with every chord in a harmonic progression, Bm is helping to move the song towards resolution - a feeling of completeness. That is accomplished by pulling the listener towards the root chord.

When you listen to most songs, you can usually tell where they are centered. That center is most often represented by the root chord of the key, in this case A major. 

B minor combines the notes B, D and F# in the 1 3m 5 note order from the B major scale. Those are the 2, 4 and 6 notes from the A major scale:

As you can see above, the notes of the key line up perfectly for you to construct the B minor chord. Again, proof that if you just follow the pattern, it'll all work out!

B minor shows up in six keys, this being the third time we've seen it. A major is the last major key for B minor. We'll see it again when we get to minor keys along the Circle of Fifths.

The B minor chord is found in these major keys:

   

There are also three minor keys, which are B minor, E minor and F# minor:

You can look over the exercise files for B minor here.

Most of the time we see B minor as a barre chord, but there are plenty of places on the guitar neck to play B minor without barring strings. This exercise shows you nearly a dozen in the twelve fret area of the fingerboard. Gotta love options!

The exercise files download is a zip file, but a number of folks have been requesting that the files be available as individual MP3 and PDF files rather than zip files. I'm considering a few ways to do this and will let you know what I decide. For now, if the files are already zipped, they're going to stay that way because of the amount of work it will take to reorganize them.

Moving forward, for any new files I create, we'll try linking to separate files and see how it goes. Talk to ya later.

Peace~

Dave