Hi, I am Stewart Bull from licklibrary.com and welcome to this lesson on playing barre chords. Before we learn an actual barre chord, the first chord we need to learn is an E major and we are going to play it right here.
Now, with this chord, we have three open notes and three fretted notes. The open notes are lower E of the B string, which is also known as the second string and the high E which is also known as the sixth string. As I have said before, the lower E which is known as the sixth string, the first finger is going to the first fret G string, our second finger is going to second fret A string and our third finger is going to the second fret D string.
Okay, so if we now want to play a barre chord, what we need to do is take this first finger and recreate this part of the guitar here. This is where the strings pass over. If you play them all open, you will hear them all sound. So if I move my finger up to the third fret, which is a G note, what I do is I barre all the strings. Now, I basically move that up in pitch. What I am going to do now is use my second, third and my little finger to recreate the chord that we first played or the chord shaped that we first played. Okay, so what happens now is that second finger is going to go on the fifth fret A string. This little finger is going to go on the fifth fret D string and my second finger is going to go on the fourth fret G string.
So we are actually making the same shape with this three fingers as we originally did with the other fingers but what we have done is we have used this first finger to barre across. What you do is get the same sound to the first chord but higher in pitch. That is the first one and we move up. The great thing about this chord is you can pretty much move it wherever you want. So if you are into writing songs, you can start there then move that barre chord up. Now, it actually takes quite a little bit of strength to play this chord. What you are going to find when you first do it. It is going to be really difficult to get all these strings to ring out clearly. Also, when you start, if you go further down the neck towards this end of the neck, the frets are farther apart and you get to find it a little bit more difficult to stretch.
So one of the things that I recommend when you are first learning this is come further up to the guitar like around on the eight fret or it does not really matter, just pick a fret that is somewhere up. The frets are a little bit closer together and you should find it easy to play. Now these are major chords and if you know the note names on the lower E string, which will get you into another lesson, you can start to basically play all the major chords. E major, F major, G major, and so on. Now one other thing that I want to show you is by taking off this second finger and just using these three fingers. Now, you have the minor version of that chord. So when the finger is on, second finger on fourth fret G string, we have G major. When the finger is lifted off, still using the barre, we have G minor. So by using that moveable barre chord, you have all the major and all the minor chords, have fun and good luck.
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