Perhaps you’ve heard of this term before.  What is relative minor anyway?

To understand it helps to first have a basic understanding of major and minor scales.  As you may already know, major scales sound like “do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti”.  They sound uplifting and happy.  Minor scales sound darker and moodier than major scales.

A relative minor scale is a minor scales that has the same notes as some major scale.  The relative minor scale will start on a different note than the major scale. 

As an example take the C major scale.  It has the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B.  When you play these notes in order it will sound like a major scale (bright and happy). 

An A minor scale has the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, G.  These are the same seven notes as in the C major scale but this time instead of starting on C, the scale starts on A.  This tells you that A minor is the relative minor to C major.  When you play the notes in this order they will sound darker and sadder than the major scale. 

So if both scales have the same notes why do they sound different?  This could be explained in a few different ways but the simple answer is that they start on different notes.  A more detailed explanation has to do with the distance between the notes in the scale and will be the subject of a future post. 

Also, you could try playing these same seven notes while starting on a note other than C or A.  In that case you will have played on of the “modes”.  Modes are an interesting topic and will also be covered in more detail in the future.

You might be wondering at this point why you would ever care about relative minor.  Well one nice benefit is that once you learn a major scale (or even a major pentatonic scale) then you have automatically learned a minor scale to go along with it.  You just need to find out which note to start on to turn in into minor.

On fretted instruments this is easy.  The relative minor is three frets below the major.  So taking our example from above if you find a C on the eighth fret of the low string of the guitar or bass and then move down three frets to the fifth fret you will have an A. 

This tells you that A minor is the relative minor to C major.  It also says that if you want to play an A minor scale you could use a C major pattern.  The only difference is that you would start on an A  note instead of a C note.