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

Two fingers, no barre, three strings left ringing. Am7 on the guitar is x 0 2 0 1 0, and on a keyboard it is A, C, E and G, four white keys and not an accidental in sight. That price is why the same grip turns up in three different jobs before a learner has finished their first songbook: tonic seventh of A minor, vi of C major, ii of G major. Cheap chords get used, and this one is about as cheap as a four note chord gets.

Try It: Am7 in the Chord Finder

Set the root to A, sound the minor triad, then add G on top and watch a fourth white key light up.

The Notes of Am7

Written out: A, C, E, G. Start on A and take every second white key upward and you have played the chord, skipping B, D and F on the way.

How Am7 Is Built

Take A minor, A, C and E, and put G a minor 7th above the root. The G is the note A natural minor already offers on its seventh degree, so nothing is borrowed and nothing is raised. Sharpen it to G♯ and the chord becomes AmMaj7, the tonic seventh of A harmonic minor. Use F♯ instead of G and you get Am6, which drags the harmony into Dorian. Sharpen the C instead and the chord turns into A7, which has a tritone in it and a place it must go.

Everything above the root spells C major. C, E and G with an A underneath is the whole chord, and read from the bottom up those same four notes are C6, which the C Major 6th Chord page takes as its subject. From this end the double identity is less of a puzzle than it sounds, since all three of the jobs listed above put A in the bass and keep it there.

Am7 on the Piano

Thumb and little finger both land inside a group of three black keys, at opposite ends of it and an octave apart. A sits between the second and third raised keys of the group, G between the first and second of the next group up, while C and E sit in open ground between them. Right hand 1, 2, 3, 5. The span is ten semitones, short of an octave, so no small hand is excluded.

What the fingers meet is a chord with no friction in it. Stack A, C, E and G and the gaps run three semitones, four, then three: no semitone, no tritone, nothing narrower than a minor 3rd. That is what people mean when they call a minor seventh restful. Only the third inversion exposes anything, since G and A land next to each other there as a whole tone.

The voicing worth learning is not the stack. Build it in fourths instead: A, D, G, C from the bottom, with E on top. Those five notes are A minor pentatonic complete, the chord plus the D it never had, and nothing in the spread crowds anything else. For comping under a soloist, drop to two notes in the left hand, A and G, and let the right hand do as it likes above them.

Am7 on the Guitar

The open form sounds A2, E3, G3, C4, E4. Coming from open A minor, x 0 2 2 1 0, the finger you lift off the third string was holding an A, a duplicate of the bass. The open string underneath it is G, so the chord gets its seventh for free and loses nothing but a duplicate.

Come at it from the other side and the relative pair becomes something you can feel. Open C major is x 3 2 0 1 0. Lift the ring finger off the fifth string, leave everything else exactly where it is, and x 0 2 0 1 0 is Am7. One finger, one string, and the four notes above the bass never move: a C major triad with C in the bass, then the same triad with A in the bass.

The sixth string wants damping with the thumb. Let it ring and 0 0 2 0 1 0 is Am7 with E in the bass, hollow but usable, though with three E strings sounding out of six the fifth ends up carrying more of the chord than the root does.

Away from the nut, the Em7 shape barred at the fifth fret gives 5 7 5 5 5 5, one flat column with the fifth string reaching to the seventh fret. Those are the frets the first A minor pentatonic box occupies, so the barre chord and the scale a guitarist already solos with share a hand position and the fingers never leave home. For comping, x x 7 9 8 8 carries one of each note on the top four strings, and 5 x 5 5 x x is the shell: root, seventh and third, exactly one fret lower on the third string than the A7 shell in the same position.

Inversions

The second inversion is the compact one, a minor 6th from bottom to top, and it puts G and A side by side where the ear notices them. The third arrives whenever a bass line steps down from A to G while the upper voices hold still: nothing above the bass changes, only the name of the chord. For the general mechanics, see Chord Inversions and Voice Leading.

Voicings

Which Keys Contain Am7

• degree 1 (I) of A natural minor
• degree 1 (I) of A dorian
• degree 6 (VI) of C major
• degree 2 (II) of G major
• degree 4 (IV) of E natural minor
• rooted on degree 1 of, and entirely contained in, A minor pentatonic

A natural minor, A Dorian and A Phrygian all take this chord as their tonic seventh, and they disagree about the second and sixth degrees, which Am7 does not contain. The symbol therefore tells a soloist nothing about which of the three is in force, and that vagueness is useful: a vamp on Am7 lets a player choose the mode bar by bar. The last entry is the one guitarists should notice. Add D to these four notes and you have the pentatonic scale they learned first, so four notes in five of any lick already belong to the chord.

Where Am7 Shows Up

The G major row is the busiest address, and the reason is arithmetic rather than taste. Am7 is a C major triad over A, and C major is the IV of G, so the two commonest chords to put in front of a dominant in this key are the same four notes with the bass swapped. Moving on to D7 costs almost nothing either: A stays put as the fifth, C stays as the seventh, G drops a semitone to F♯ and E drops a whole tone to D. Two voices move, both downward, both by a step or less, which is why these three chords sound joined rather than stacked. The full account is in The ii, V, I Progression in Practice.

The Dorian row is a whole tune in some hands. “Oye Como Va” rocks between Am7 and D7 and never leaves, which works because the two chords between them contain every note of A Dorian except B, and because the D7 supplies the F♯ that separates Dorian from plain A minor. Both shapes sit in the first position on a guitar and both are two fingers on an organ, so the groove can carry the piece without the harmony asking for attention.

In C major the chord is the vi, and pop writing prefers it to plain A minor there for a reason worth naming: the added G is the fifth of the key, the note the ear is most likely to be holding already, so the vi arrives without disturbing anything.

E minor is the guitar’s other home minor key, and Am7 is its iv. Em7 to Am7 asks for no barre, no accidental and no shift of position, which is why so much folk and singer songwriter writing rocks between exactly those two chords.

Related Chords

• A Minor Chord the triad this is built on
• C Major 6th Chord the same four notes read from C
• A Minor 6th Chord F♯ on top instead of G, and a different mode
• A Dominant 7th Chord the same seventh over a major third
• Seventh Chords: The Complete Guide
• Guitar Chord Shapes: The CAGED System for moving the m7 shapes up the neck

Learn More

• Diatonic Chords: A Beginner’s Guide
• Extended Chords and Jazz Harmony
• Pentatonic Scales for Improvisation
• The Circle of Fifths Explained
• The A Natural Minor Scale