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Guitar chord forum - chordie → Acoustic → bar chords
Hi,
I started playing very basic guitar since I was 20, and when I started having children at 24 I put it down and never developed it. The one thing I never learned was bar chords which you need in so many songs. I am now 52 and have picked up my guitar again, but find it very hard to do bar chords. Does anyone have any advice or tecniques to help my fingers get strong enough to do them?
Adela
Adela, welcome and congratulations.
Barre chords are a matter of practice. I think this is probably the single most discussed problem on this board. We ALL have or had problems with barre chords. I'm in the 'have' group.
Here are some suggestions others have made that helped me.
1. Don't squeeze, but pull your barring finger down. Squeezing too hard causes your hand to fatigue quickly.
2. Use good posture.
3. Place your left thumb just above the center of the neck and use it as a pivot point.
4. Anticipate the chord. Be thinking ahead of which chord is coming next and prepare yourself to play it.
5. Put your wrist far forward.
6. Use an exercise ball during the day to strengthen your fingers.
These are some things that have helped me. I still am poor at barre chords, but have gotten so that I can usually play F, F#m, and Bm without being too slow about it and without it sounding like completely dead strings. It's really just a matter of practice, practice, practice.
Best of luck to you. I look forward to seeing your post when you say you worked a barre chord into a song and are all excited about it.
- Zurf
I've gotten barre chords down now, just a little slow at switching between them and open chords. The best thing is just form the chord slowly, get every string to ring out, then do it again. Now I've found a-shaped barre chords... which have disproved my theory that I'll never hate anything worse than e-shaped barre chords
The barre chord problem seems to be an almost weekly discussion. Using the search function, I found the below threads that are all pretty recent (maybe some info in there will help - but honestly, I don't think there is a magic solution, the only answer is practice, practice........)
http://www.chordie.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5637
http://www.chordie.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5985
http://www.chordie.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=6169
As you have found full "Barre chords" are a handful especially on the acoustic
Sometimes if you only hit the appropriate strings you can get by with an easier shape!
There are a couple of “work arounds†Instead of going for the Full Barre chords straight away try this;
Playing "F" (we should say F major, but we don’t bother!) is a bit of a challenge as you may have found!
do it as what I would call an “open" chord is like this XX3211 ( a 4 string chord that is moveable)
There are not any “open" strings in it anyway, so it is a bit of misnomer!
I seem to remember it took me ages to get all the strings ringing true!
The bonus is that when you can do it then you can play every Major chord
because it is a "moveable shape" so (with the same fingering) start in the
2nd fret it is F#
3rd fret it is G etc
So you have learnt every Major chord with one shape without the "pain" of a full barre chord
For a minor chord
This shape XX3321 = Bb minor in 1st fret
B minor starting in the 2nd fret
C minor in the 3rd and so on
Hope this helps!
regards
Mark
Guitar chord forum - chordie → Acoustic → bar chords
