More bar chord examples (Part 1)
You should by now be starting to familiarise your self with Bar chords. this can be one of the first hard hurdles for a guitarist to overcome as changing to bar chords from any other chord is pretty tough, especially keeping it sounding fluid. The key here is to not give up and slowly try developing little exercises to slowly introduce bar chords into a chord progression - we will go through this later on.
With reference the last lesson on Bar Chords we discussed the fact that there are several shapes bar chords can be made from, all are chords you should now be starting to feel familiar with from our earlier lessons. Swap your fingers around and move the chord to another place on the neck, using your first finger as a bar, you have created a whole new chord using the same shape.
Here is the F chord. As you should be able to spot, it is taken from the E shape. The E shape is a chord that utilises 6 strings so these properties are taken along to the F chord. In other words the F chord utilises 6 strings also. Bear in mind as well that the bass note of the E chord is in fact the open E string. This is called the root note. The root of a chord will almost always be the name of the chord. For example, an E chord will almost always have an E as the root. A D chord will almost always the a D note in the root.
Taking this on board the F chord will almost always have an F as the root note. If we look at the chord example above we can see that the bass note of the chord is on the first fret of the bottom E string. Counting up the neck E is open, F is first fret. Likewise if we moved this shape up to 3rd fret it would be a G chord. Can you guess what chord it might be if we moved it up to 5th fret?
If you guessed A then you would be correct. We simply count up the notes
E - F - F# - G - G# - A
This means that you can now use this shape to play any major chord up the neck.
As promised we will now break down the correct fingering for these chords so everyone is clear how to properly play them.
4th finger - 3rd fret - D string
3rd finger - 3rd fret - A string
2nd finger - 2nd fret - G String
1st finger - Bar across all of the first fret
Take a look at this.
This is the Fm chord. It is the same shape as an Em and is only one note different from the E shape we just worked on. The fingering is the same with just your 2nd finger removed. In exactly the same way as the E shape we can move this to any location on the fretboard.
If you can get the above mastered you will have successfully learnt to play any major or minor chord using the E shape. That’s 24 chords from just ultimately learning one chord.
As a practice I would suggest you try just adding one bar chord into a chord progression. Try this
G - D - C - F
- using the F chord as the bar chord on first fret. Keep going through this progressions very slowly until you can smoothly change between chords. This may take some time but a little practice every day goes a long way.
Any questions about this or anything else on the site then please feel free to leave a comment and I will respond as soon as possible.
Get on with this and we will then work on the others shortly.
