Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

E Minor chord

I haven’t been playing enough chords, and I have a question about Whiskey Before Breakfast. I have my D chord as 7 on the G string, 4 on the D string and 5 on the A string, what would be a good finger position for E minor?

How about 4 5 2 0? Also could do 4 5 7 0 or 9 5 7 0. If you want more of a ringing open sound instead of a chop, I like 0 2 2 3 and use that a fair amount.

Here’s a resource for finding chord shapes:
mandolincafe.com/cgi-bin/chords/ch.pl

I need to put in yet another plug for Don Julin’s ‘Mandolin for Dummies’ book. That chapter on Jethro’s 3 finger chords is pure gold. Spend a couple of weeks with that and you’ll have dozens of major, minor, and 7th chords all over the neck at your beck and call.

He also has a youtube on’Whiskey’ out there which shows 3 different approaches to backup. It’s more about rhythm, but he throws in a couple of fingering variations too. It’s only about 6 minutes long and worth a view.

Edit. Found the clip I was thinking about: youtu.be/oUCHfqMXGCo . It does show the Em that Mike mentioned. And the form is actually one of the Jethro 3 chord fingerings. That particular form could actually become a 4 finger chord with a full barre, something I do, and I suspect everyone else coming to mandolin from a guitar background uses.