Hey Friend,
I just happened to see last night that Chuck Berry passed away on Saturday. If you have any love for The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, you can thank Chuck Berry for being a huge influence on the British Invasion.
You would know Chuck Berry from his own hits like "Johnny B. Goode" and "Roll Over Beethoven."
E Minor
The root chord of the E minor key is... E minor. That was anticlimactic!
That makes Em the Im chord in the harmonic progression. We saw it in the last key as the Vm chord. Hmmm, I'm detecting a pattern here...
With major keys and the Circle of Fifths, you could easily determine the next key on the circle by counting up five note letters. C went to G, G went to D, D went to A, and so on.
Looks like we have the same thing going on with minor keys. Am went to Em, Em will go to Bm, Bm will got to F#m (you'll see).
So we have another pattern we can use to help us remember which chords and notes belong where in the various scales and progressions.
Em is constructed from the E minor scale, which we saw yesterday:
E F# G A B C D (E)
Like a major chord from the major scale, we're going to take the 1 3 5 notes from the E minor scale and that gives us the Em triad. Those notes are E, G and B.
The open E minor chord is easy to play, only requiring two of your fingers and a full strum across all the strings. In fact, all the simple triads are easy once you know where they are on the guitar neck.
Review these exercises and practice the chords that DON'T come easily to you (okay, you can practice the easy ones, too!).
Y'all enjoy these. I'm off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz... Turning brain off now...
Peace~
Dave | 
