E Minor 7th Chord: Notes, Voicings, and How to Play It

One finger. Put it on the fifth string at the 2nd fret, strum all six, and what comes back is E, B, D, G, B and E: four different notes, a complete Em7, nothing muted and nothing to aim at. No four note chord on the instrument is cheaper, and none can be, because the six open strings by themselves produce five different notes rather than four. The oddity worth sitting with is that the seventh chord costs less than the triad it is built from. E minor takes two fingers. This takes one, so a great many players sound a seventh chord in their first week and are told what one is some years later.

Try It: Em7 in the Chord Finder

Set the root to E and pick Dorian, then switch to G major and watch the same four notes move from the first degree to the sixth.

The Notes of Em7

Four notes, four white keys, no accidental anywhere.

How Em7 Is Built

Three thirds stacked without a gap: E up to G is a minor 3rd, G up to B is a major 3rd, B up to D is a minor 3rd again. The nearest simpler chord is the E minor triad with D added on top, a whole step above the fifth and a whole step below the octave, close enough to soften the chord and too far from anything else to bite.

Two other chords are one move away. Put a C in the bass under E, G, B and D and the five notes sounding are Cmaj9, so this chord is a C major ninth that has misplaced its root. Read the four notes from G instead of from E and they spell G6, which is a rotation rather than an addition: the same pitches, a different lowest voice, a different chord. That side of the story is told on the G6 page. What follows takes the E side.

Nearer home, take the E minor pentatonic scale, E G A B D, and remove the A. What is left is exactly this chord. The first scale most guitarists learn and the first seventh chord most guitarists play are the same handful of notes with one taken out, which is a large part of why solos in E minor sit so easily over it.

Em7 on the Piano

Four white keys and an even shape: right hand 1, 2, 3 and 5 on E, G, B and D, left hand 5, 4, 2 and 1. The span from E up to D is a minor 7th, comfortable for a small hand, and because the notes are stacked in thirds there are no two neighbouring keys anywhere in the grip.

The fastest way to find it is to stop thinking of it as one chord. Play E alone in the left hand and a plain G major triad in the right. That is the whole chord, and it is also how the figure actually appears in the music, since the right hand is then holding a shape it already knows while the left hand names the harmony.

Pianists notice one thing about it before theorists do. In D major, where Em7 is the ii and turns up constantly, it is the only one of the seven diatonic seventh chords that can be played without touching a black key. Every other one carries an F♯ or a C♯. So the ii chord, the one a D major tune reaches for on the way to every cadence, is the single place in the key where the hand goes flat and stops reading accidentals.

Low down it behaves well. Root position puts no half steps and no seconds in the bottom of the chord, so E and G can sit below middle C without turning to mud. The arrangement to avoid is D under E, which puts a whole step at the bottom and blurs both notes.

Em7 on the Guitar

The open form is 0 2 0 0 0 0, one finger on the fifth string, and the reason it works is in the tuning itself. Standard tuning is E, A, D, G, B, E. Four of those six open strings are already chord tones here, and the fifth string’s A is the only outsider. Fret it at the 2nd and it becomes B, another chord tone. Six ringing strings, one finger, done.

Leave that finger off and the guitar is still close. All six open strings sound E, A, D, G, B and E, which is this chord with an A added to it, an Em11 with no ninth. That is why an open string can be allowed to ring under almost anything played in E minor and never sound like a mistake: the instrument is tuned to a chord and the chord is this one.

The barred version, the A minor 7th shape with an index barre across the 7th fret, is a real alternative rather than a chore. It clears the bass by an octave and lands in the middle of the neck, which is what you want when three low E’s are too heavy for the arrangement.

The compact grip on the top four strings is the one that travels. x x 2 4 3 3 has all four notes once each, no doubling, no open string, and slides to any root. Anybody comping behind a bass player wants this rather than the open form, which spends four of its six strings on repeats of E and B.

Inversions

First inversion has a second name that is used far more often than the slash chord: with G at the bottom these four notes are G6, and an arranger picks the label by what the passage is doing rather than by what the notes are.

The guitar makes the swap physically obvious. Hold 0 2 0 0 0 0, add a finger at the 3rd fret of the sixth string, and the bass moves from E to G while nothing above it changes at all. Rock that one finger on and off and a listener hears two chords, vi and I in G major, going past.

Third inversion is the weak one. D under E puts the seventh in the bass with the root a whole step above it, and the pair sound like a suspension waiting to resolve rather than a chord in its own right.

Voicings

The fifth is the note to lose first. E, G and D still say minor and still say seventh, and dropping B frees a string or a finger without costing anything. Losing the root works too, as long as somebody else has it: G, B and D over an E in the bass is what a pianist plays in a band and what the guitar’s 0 2 0 0 0 0 nearly does already, since its bass note is an open string doing no work.

Adding rather than subtracting, F♯ on top gives Em9 and A gives Em11, and neither addition threatens anything, because there is no tritone anywhere inside E, G, B and D to be protected. That is the underlying reason a minor seventh takes extensions more readily than a dominant does, and why this chord is so hard to spoil.

Which Keys Contain Em7

• iii7 of C major
• ii7 of D major
• vi7 of G major
• i7 of E natural minor
• v7 of A natural minor
• iv7 of B natural minor

Of those six, D major and G major carry most of the working traffic, because both are guitar keys and in both this chord is a pivot rather than a decoration. It also sits on the first degree of E Dorian, where a whole vamp can be built on it, and all four of its notes fall inside G major pentatonic, so a pentatonic line in G runs over it without a wrong note available anywhere.

Where Em7 Shows Up

The first row is why this chord turns up in every guitar method. Em7, A7 and Dmaj7 can all be played in open position with no barre and no shift: 0 2 0 0 0 0, then x 0 2 0 2 0, then x x 0 2 2 2. One finger, then two, then three. A beginner can play a complete minor to dominant to major cadence in D before learning a single movable shape, and a lot of jazz teaching sits in this key because of that accident of tuning.

Row three uses the same shape differently. Alternate Em7 with A7 and neither chord goes anywhere: the harmony sits still while the bass moves, and the C♯ inside the A7 is what tells the ear this is Dorian rather than E minor. Funk and film cues run on two chord loops of exactly this kind, and the one finger form makes the guitar’s contribution almost free.

The fifth row is the theoretical one made practical. Because these four notes are the top of a C major ninth, playing Em7 while a bass player holds C produces a full, unmuddied Cmaj9 with nothing doubled. That is the standard way a piano and bass split an extended chord between them, and it means this shape is doing service in tunes whose charts never mention it.

Related Chords

• E Minor Chord, the triad underneath, and a finger more expensive
• E Dominant 7th Chord, the same D over a raised third
• E Major 7th Chord, which raises both the third and the seventh
• E Minor 6th Chord, C♯ where this chord has D
• G Major 6th Chord, these four notes with G in the bass
• The E Natural Minor Scale
• The E Dorian Scale
• The E Minor Pentatonic Scale
• Guitar Chord Shapes: The CAGED System

Learn More

• Seventh Chords: A Complete Guide
• The ii V I Progression in Jazz
• Extended Chords and Jazz Harmony for Em9 and Em11
• Chord Inversions and Voice Leading
• Diatonic Chords: A Beginner’s Guide