Am major9 (Stairway to Heaven)

Today's guitar chord of the day is A minor major9 [Am major9]. This is the second chord in the famous intro to Led Zep's Stairway to Heaven (after A minor) from Led Zeppelin IV.

We recently completed our series of 12 Dominant 7th Guitar Chords. If you've missed any of the chords look back through the previous posts, these chords are really useful once you've learnt them. Today we'll look at modifying these dominant 7th chords to create other common guitar chords.

For example, we can easily change a 7th chord into a minor 7th chord by lowering the 3rd one fret (every http://chord-a-day.blogspot.com/ tutorial tells you which one's the 3rd). Knowing this and our 7th inversions you've also learnt 12 new minor 7th inversions, just by changing one note!

To create a minor7b5 (Also know as half diminished) chord, lower the 3rd one fret and the 5th one fret. In fact that's exactly what we've done here to change this G7 guitar inversion, into this Gm7b5 guitar inversion.

There are lots more examples, to create a minor 6th chord, lower the 3rd one fret and lower the 7th one fret. This is what we've done to change this 7th inversion into this minor 6th inversion.

The really useful thing is, if you have learnt the 12 dominant 7th guitar inversions and you know which note to change, you know now 12 minor7 chords, 12 minor6 chords etc.,

Here are some more examples to try on your guitar:

• minor7 - lower the 3rd one fret
• major7 - raise the 7th one fret
• 6th - lower the 7th one fret
• minor6 - lower the 3rd one fret, lower the 7th one fret
• minor7b5 - lower the 3rd one fret, lower the 5th one fret
• 7#5 - raise the 5th one fret
• 7b5 - lower the 5th one fret
• 7b9 - raise the root note one fret
• 9th - raise the root two frets

Almost any common chord can be created by modifying the intervals of our Dominant 7th chords, even more unusual chords.

Today's guitar chord of the day is A minor major9 [Am major0]. This second chord in the famous intro to Led Zep's Stairway to Heaven (after A minor) can be created by modifying one of our 12 dominant 7th guitar chords.

We've started with this dominant 7th guitar inversion, raised the 7th one fret to give us a major 7th and raised the root note two frets for the 9th giving us all the notes we need for Am major 9.
minor Major 9 chords almost always follow or precede a minor chord with same root, they usually function as elaborations of the main chord.

minor Major 9 chords use these scale degrees: 1, b3, 5, 7, 9
A minor Major 9 uses these notes: A, C, E, G#, B
Our inversion uses the notes in this order: G#, C, E, B

Try playing around with modifying our other Dominant 7th inversions on the guitar and tune back tomorrow for another Guitar Chord of the Day.