Learn 5 Ways to Play D Minor | Acoustic Guitar’s Chord By Chord

Welcome to the latest installment of Chord by Chord, a series designed to build your understanding of harmony and the fretboard. With A minor and E minor chords now under your belt, this week you’ll learn a bunch of D minor shapes.

The Work
As usual, let’s start by identifying some notes. A minor triad is made up of D (root), F (minor third), and A (fifth), shown in Example 1. You’ll find the most common D minor shape in Example 2. Note that this voicing has four notes, with the D doubled. You could play it with your third finger on string 2 as written, or use your fourth finger on that string instead.

Example 3a shows a five-note Dm barre chord in fifth position—see if you can identify the doubled notes—while Example 3b shows a compact variation that uses the open D string as the lowest note. You could also include the open A string (the fifth of the chord) for a slightly different sound.

Another Dm barre chord, this one containing all six strings, can be found in tenth position (Example 4a). As with the fifth-position Dm chord, it can also be played in an abbreviated form, using the open D string as the lowest note. Try adding the open A string to this voicing as well.

The Result
If you’ve been following along with this series, you now know a bunch of different shapes for C, G, D, Am, Em, and now Dm chords. A couple of songs that include Dm are “505” by the Arctic Monkeys and “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye. Next time I’ll teach you how to start connecting some minor chords in two different keys.