How to Play the Open Position Gm Chord and CAGED Gm Shape
The open-position Gm chord is rarely used—you’ll find very few songs that include it. I play it in Starman, though David Bowie didn’t use this voicing himself.
The only song I can think of that actually includes a Gm shape is All My Life by Foo Fighters.
But my introduction to the Gm chord didn’t come from either of these songs—it came from learning the CAGED system.
That discovery was a turning point. Without understanding the five positions for minor chords, just as we have five positions for the minor pentatonic scale, I couldn’t truly grasp the layout of the fretboard.
Above, you can see the Chordacus image showing the open-position Gm chord and its corresponding moveable shape.
Isn’t it odd that the open Gm chord has been largely ignored in popular music?
As a moveable shape, it’s a bit of a stretch and not the most practical. However, once we start extending it, the Gm shape becomes just as useful as any other minor chord in the CAGED system.
Let’s look at how that works next.
Gm chord extensions
We can’t build any 9 chords here, as the 9 would fall on the same string as the m3rd—there’s simply no room for both.
That said, here are all the possible Gm-shaped chord extensions:
- Gm chord (root, 5th, m3rd, 5th)
- Gm7 (root, m3rd, b7, root)
- Gm7b5 (root, b7, m3rd, b5)
- Gdim7 (root, b5, bb7, m3rd)
- Gmmaj7 (root, m3rd, 5th, 7)
- Gm6 (root, 6, m3rd, 5th)
- Gm11 (root, b7, 9, 11)
It’s a good start to simply play through all these chords and get a feel for them. But that alone won’t be enough—you need to hear them in songs to really understand and remember their individual character.
As mentioned earlier, Starman features an open Gm chord on the first line of the verse.
The Gmmaj7 is incredibly rare, yet possibly the easiest to remember once you’ve played it and associated its flavour with a James Bond film score.
Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers ends with an Ammaj7 chord for the second guitar—voiced in a Gm shape.
Building scales and arpeggios around the Gm chord/shape
Start by visualising the Gm chord shape—this is your foundation. From here, you can build arpeggios by simply adding the right intervals. For a min7 arpeggio, add the b7. For a min7b5, add the b7 and b5.
To get the minor pentatonic, fill in all intervals around the shape: root, m3rd, 4th, 5th, and b7.
Once you have that minor pentatonic framework in place, it becomes easy to construct all remaining minor modes:
- Blues scale, add b5
- Conspirian, add b5 and maj7
- Dorian, add 2 and 6
- Aeolian, add 2 and b6
- Phrygian, add b2 and b6
Below is a diagram that maps out all these intervals around the Gm shape. Once you can see this clearly, you’ll be able to build any minor arpeggio or scale using this form.
Mastering the Gm Shape: From Chord to Scale Through Songs and Exercises
There are exercises for all of this in the SEPR—a module included when you sign up for my guitar courses.
Inside the courses, we don’t just run drills. We learn by playing songs. As part of that, we move chords, licks, and melodies around the fretboard, trying out all the shapes in context.
This is how you learn to use the Gm shape musically. Exercises are a good start, but they’re not enough on their own.
Here are the stages you’ll need to go through to truly master the Gm shape:
- Play the Gm shape as an open-position chord
- Make it a moveable chord shape
- Learn to see all intervals in the shape (root, 5th, m3rd, 5th)
- Extend to all possible chords
- Build the two arpeggios
- Build all relevant minor scales
- Try them in songs
That last point is the most important.
My guitar courses are built around forming great habits so that eventually, you can do all this instantly with any new song you learn.
Hope to see you there so we can get to work on the Gm shape—and the rest of the CAGED system too.
The Gm Chord | Related Pages
Guitar chords
You can learn how to build all minor and major guitar chords using the so-called CAGED system.
This is the foundation upon which we learn to extend chords and build arpeggios and modes as well.
The G chord
The most misunderstood chord of all CAGED chords may be the seemingly straightforward G chord.
With several options in its open-position form, it becomes impossible to fret in its full glory once turned into a moveable shape.
Intermediate Acoustic
Most intermediate acoustic tunes can’t be played using just basic open-position chords.
We have to move up the fretboard and play CAGED barre chords as well.
We incorporate bass lines, add licks, extend chords, and play vocal melodies. Most importantly, we invent second guitar parts and play these songs together.