The Am6 chord
Start with the recipe. The notes are A - C - E - F#, a minor sixth, otherwise known as the Am6. The chord feels a minor with a touch of brightness, which is why writers chasing a vintage minor flavour keep landing on it. Light My Fire by The Doors leans on Am6 throughout the verse. You will find it inside vintage jazz and 1930s-style ballads. The rest of this page lays out the common voicings, the interval theory, the progressions where the chord fits, and the records that lean on it for structural work.
Hear the Am6 in the chord builder →Voicings for Am6
Common ways to grip the Am6 on guitar and piano. Guitar diagrams read low E to high E left-to-right; an × means muted, an open circle above the nut means an open string. Filled dots are fretted notes.
Guitar , full chord shapes
CAGED-derived voicings for Am6 across the neck. Pick the shape closest to where your hand already sits.
Guitar , triad shapes
Three-note voicings on three adjacent strings. Light textures for arpeggios, pop layering and chord-melody work.
Piano voicings
Root position and inversions. The bass note matters: each inversion changes how the chord sits under a melody.
The theory behind Am6
Progressions that use Am6
Short progressions that put the Am6 to work. Each one is shown in a different key so you can pick the one that suits your singer.
This chord appears as a borrowed or passing chord in many minor-key progressions.
→ Build this in the chord builderSongs that feature Am6
Real records where this chord does structural work. No lyrics quoted, just the title and artist so you can pull up a copy and hear it in context.
- Light My Fire by The Doors. Am6 colour within the song's verse.
- Black Magic Woman by Santana. Am6 inside the song's verse harmony.
- My Favorite Things by Standard. Am6 colour in the verse.
Related chords
Chords a step away from the Am6 in the songwriting circle, the natural neighbours when you want a substitution.
Keys where Am6 lives
The keys where this chord turns up diatonically. Open any key page for the full set of progressions that lean on it.
More songwriting tools
Got the chord but still wrestling with the lyric? Find the right rhyme in RhymeForge, or break a writer's block with the unexpected word-pair generator in CollisionLab. Need to map a full progression? The chord builder on the home page is where the Am6 fits into context. All free, no signup.
About the chord builder
The Undercover Zest chord progression builder is a free interactive tool that maps every diatonic and borrowed chord in every key. Click a Roman numeral to hear it, drag chords into a progression, then audition voicings, inversions and tensions until the song clicks.
This page is a static reference for the Am6. For interactive playback, voice-leading hints and substitution suggestions, open the chord builder above.