How to Play Guitar: Barre Chords

When you are practicing your skills, pick out even three notes. Play those different patterns, different tempos, and just practice all the way through until you are familiar with the scales. At this point, you should have about two weeks of practice under your belt. You feel comfortable changing between chords and working in little lead patterns.

Let us move on to our bar chords. I am going to show you Major, Minor and seventh bar chords on the sixth string and on the fifth string. To make a bar chord we want to take our Major pattern. We actually want to move it up, but what we need to do is add a bar here because we longer going to play these open strings.

The first thing that we want to do is take our first finger, lay it across all six strings, and apply even pressure. You want all strings to ring out clearly. (Demonstration) This is going to take some practice. Do not be discouraged if you are starting to sound (Demonstration) like that at first. Just keep practicing and it will all come. Take your second, third and fourth finger and finish that Major pattern. So, we have our first finger barring all six strings. We have our second finger in the second fret of our third string. We have our third and fourth fingers on the fourth and fifth strings of the third fret. It is our standard Major pattern. This is now an F Major. (Demonstration)

To change F to G, we simply use the same pattern. We just move up the whole step. (Demonstration) We are using the same pattern.

To switch from a Major chord pattern, we will use G now. If we want to go to Minor; we just lift up our second finger. (Demonstration) That is G Minor. It is the same minor pattern as our open E. Again, we are just adding the bar. (Demonstration)

To go from G Minor to G seventh, we put our second finger back down. We are going to lift up our fourth finger. (Demonstration) There is G seventh.

Again, bar chords are movable. If you want to move up another half step, here is A. (Demonstration) There is A seventh. To go the Major, put your fourth finger back down at Major position. To minor, lift up your second finger. (Demonstration)


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