Guitar Basics: Learn Barre Chords

1. Introduction: Hello, thank you so much for joining me. I'm Jason Rivera and I'm going to take you through this bar chords class. In this class I'll be covering how to play bar chords, how to play half bar chords, how to use a Po, how to play a song that uses bar chords. And lots of tips, tricks, and resources. You can join me with your acoustic or your electric guitar. The class will give you plenty of opportunity to watch me demonstrate the various techniques that we're going to cover. And I encourage you to pause, rewind, and rewatch the video lessons as many times as you need to. I'm also going to provide you with downloadable resources for this class. I've been playing and writing music since I was a small kid, and I've been teaching music to students ages five and up, including private guitar lessons since 2012. I'm a full time musician and composer. I've written music for films, trailers, and E learning courses, and I've played in bands and toured the US since I was a teenager. My goal with this class is to teach you the beginner guitar player, how to play essential bar chord shapes. So that you can move forward, learn some of your favorite songs and express yourself more freely on the guitar. My hope is to make this process fun and easy for you. I want you to start playing bar chords as soon as possible, and I want you to use them to play your favorite songs. Thank you for watching this intro. Now grab your guitar and I'll see you in our first lesson. 2. Class Project: Okay, the class project, This is a chance for you to check in on how bar chords are going for you. And hopefully this project will be fun for you to take part in. Once you've started to watch the video lessons in the class, I'd like you to try and learn one of your favorite songs and use some bar chords to play the song. If the song doesn't feature a lot of guitar, find out what the bass or the piano is playing and see how you can apply that to the guitar. To help you figure out the chords of the song, you can go online and utilize some resources. Ultimate Guitar is great for finding chords and tabs. For songs, you can find tabs or chords for almost any song on there. I want you to record yourself playing that song. It can be a video or an audio only recording, and you can record just a section of that song or a song that you love in its entirety. It's really up to you to record video of yourself playing. You can just use the built in video camera on your smartphone or tablet to record audio. You can use an app on your smartphone, such as voice memos. Or you can record yourself with music software such as Garage Band, Logic Pro, or Cue Base if you're comfortable with recording music that way. But even if you just use a simple app like voice memos, please record yourself playing. Recording yourself playing, and then listening back is a great tool to hear your playing objectively. Then you can listen back to your recording and notes on what things you need to spend a little bit more of your practice time on. As an alternative for this project, you can also record yourself playing the song that I'm going to teach you in this class. Please don't be intimidated by this project. This is meant to be a fun project where you learn bar chords and then apply your new knowledge immediately. Hopefully after watching several lessons in this class, you'll feel confident enough in the skills that you're developing to take part in the class project. That's the intro to our class project. I hope that you're excited about it. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Getting Started: Hopefully you've already learned your open position chords. If not, you should check out some of my other classes where I cover open chords in depth. In this class, we're going to open up the fret board and expand the possibilities of what we can do on our guitar. And we're going to achieve this by learning bar chords. Grab your acoustic, or your electric guitar and a guitar pick. Make sure your guitar is tuned up. And I'll see you in the next video lesson. 4. Barre Chords: In this lesson, we're going to cover how to correctly play bar cords. With bar cords, we need to get used to using our index finger to play across the fretboard. That index finger there needs to apply a fair amount of pressure. Let's take a look at how to bar. For example, we can place our index finger across all of the strings on fret two. When we do this, we want to place the finger right behind the fret wire, right there with the index finger. We're barring all six strings, Let's keep our index finger there. And now we're going to build a cord with that. We're going to place our middle finger on the third fret of the third string. Again, we want to always try to place our fingers right behind the fret wire. Then our ring finger goes onto the fifth string, fourth fret, then our pinky goes down onto the fourth string. Fourth fret. Let's listen to each string one at a time. The sixth, the second, and the first strings are being sounded by the index finger bar. I want you to try this with me. You have to apply a fair amount of pressure with your index finger to get those strings to sound out nice and clear. If you've never played bar chords before, this chord shape is going to cause some aching in your left hand hands, most likely going to cramp up. And your wrist might get a little tight too. But I promise if you practice making this chord shape, eventually you'll form the muscle memory in your left hand and it will become so much easier to play and it will hurt less as well. Let me show you how to practice this shape. So you want to take your hand away from the guitar and then try to form the bar chord shape again. You want to do this over and over again, take it away, bring it back. The repetition here is what's going to create muscle memory for you behind the neck. You want your thumb pointed up like a thumbs up, and you want to place it in the middle of the neck as a starting point. What I've just done here is I've created an F sharp major bar cord. There's a familiar chord shape in this bar cord. It's the major Open bar cords are built from familiar open chord shapes. In this case, to create the F sharp major bar, all I did was use a fingering that allows my index finger to be free. Then I slid this shape up two frets. Then I added the index finger as the bar. Now the middle finger here is what's causing this to be a major bar cord. Placing it on the third fret of the third string makes it major. If you lift up your middle finger off the neck, now you have an F sharp minor bar cord. Hopefully you can hear the difference between the two types of when you do this, your index finger has to apply a little bit extra pressure to press on the third string as well. I want you to also notice here that if I lift up my index finger off the neck and then shift my ring and pinky fingers down to frets, I'm playing a familiar chord that's in the minor open again. This minor bar coord shape is built off of an open or shape, in this case minor. Now let's take the major bar cord shape and the first one that we learned, and we're going to move it up and down the neck. So let's start at F one. We have major sharp major major, G sharp major major, A sharp major major major, C sharp major, D major, D sharp major major. Now the frets get closer, the higher up you go on the neck. And for someone like me with big hands, it gets a little tight here, but you get the idea. We can also move the minor bar cord shape up and down the neck. Let's start at fret one again. We have minor, F sharp, minor, minor, G, sharp minor, minor, sharp, minor, minor, minor, sharp, minor, minor, D sharp minor, minor. I want you to practice playing the major and the minor bar coord shapes up and down the neck. And you could even try playing around and jumping to random frets. You can do the same thing with the minor shapes. Now hopefully you can see at this point that with just with those two shapes, you've started to unlock the fret board. Now let's take the major bar court shape and we're going to move it to the fifth string. Back on fret two, our index finger bars, strings five through one, our middle finger goes onto the third fret of the second string, our ring finger goes onto the fourth fret of the fourth string, our pinky goes onto the fourth fret of the third string. Now we have a minor bar coord that's built from the fifth string. In this case, our middle finger is causing this to be a minor cord. This happens to be a minor barcord. I hope that you'll notice that there's a familiar cord shape here, that's a minor. You can build minor bar coord shapes on the fifth string based off of the A minor open cord shape. Normally we play a minor like this. Again, we just change the fingering to open up and free our index finger to make major bar cords that are built on the fifth string. We keep our index finger down across strings five through one. Now our middle finger goes onto the fourth fret of the fourth string. Our ring finger goes onto the fourth fret of the third string, our pinky goes onto the fourth fret of the second string. In this case, our pinky is causing this shape to now become a major cord. This is a major bar cord. Using the fingers on the fourth fret like this is a little bit of a stretch for some people. As an alternative, you can instead use the ring finger to cover the fourth fret of strings, 43.2 You hopefully have guessed by now that this major bar cord shape is also based off of an open cord. If I lift up my index finger and slide my ring finger down by two frets, I have an A major open cord. Again, I took a major open, I just used different fingering the ring finger. I want you to see the connection between the open cord shapes and how you can build bar cord shapes off of them. Let's talk about how to figure out the names of these cords as we're playing these bar cord shapes up and down the fret board. Whether we're building bar cords off of the six or the fifth strings, the lowest note that our index finger is pressing down on is the root note of the. If we're building major or minor cores on the six string, the note that the index finger is pressing down on the sixth string is the root note or the name of the bard, for example. With this shape, the lowest note that our index finger is pressing down on is on the sixth string. Third fret. That note there is a, this is a major bar cord. The same principle applies to bar cords built off of the fifth string. The note that the index finger is pressing down on the fifth string is the root note of the cord and the name of the D. For example, right here, my index finger is pressing down on the fifth string seventh fret. That's the lowest note that my index finger is pressing down on. This note is E. This is a major. This means you have to learn the notes of the sixth and the fifth strings in order to figure out the name of the bar cord that you're playing. I'm going to run through the names on the six and the fifth strings for you as a reference. Let's start with the six string. We have open sharp sharp, sharp, Sharp sharp right there on the 12 fret. We're an octave up from the open, then the pattern continues as you go up. Let's cover the fifth string now with the fifth string, we have open A sharp. B, C sharp sharp. B, F sharp sharp. Again, at the 12 fret, we're an octave up from the open A. Then from there, the pattern continues on. Now I went through that pretty quickly. If you don't know the note names of each fret of the six and the fifth strings, rewind this section and study it over and over until you have these note names memorized. Let's take a minute here to talk about the difference between major and minor chords. If you take the first, the third, and the fifth notes of a scale and you combine them, you create a major chord. Let's go back to the F sharp major bar chord shape, built on the sixth string. Here our index finger is playing the root note, or one F sharp. Our middle finger is playing the third A sharp. Our ring finger is playing the fifth C sharp. Our pinky is also playing F sharp. The one but one octave higher. The index finger barring the second string is creating another sharp, also on the first string. The index finger is playing another root note, F sharp. You can see that we've duplicated some of the notes in this bar chord shape, and that makes the chord sound fuller. Again, this is an F sharp major bar. If we wanted to make this a minor chord, then we need to flatten the third note. In this case, that's a sharp, which was the middle finger on the third fret of the third string. If we release our middle finger, we flatten that A sharp to an A. Now this is an F sharp minor chord. There's a quick introduction to a little bit of music theory as it applies to the guitar and to creating major and minor bar chords. There's everything you need to know to be able to build and play full major and minor bar chords built on the sixth and the fifth strings. I'll see you in the next video lesson, where we're going to learn how to play half bar chords. 5. Half Barre Chords: In this lesson, we're going to look at how to correctly play half bar chords. Half bar chords are a great lead into playing full bar chords. They allow you to create the sounds that you want, give you the freedom to move around the fret board, but with less effort, to be honest. When I was first learning guitar, I didn't learn the half bar chord shapes, I learned the bar. But as I've taught guitar over the years to private students, I discovered that bar chords can be really frustrating for some students. So I wanted to make sure that I included a lesson on half bar chords so that you have the option to learn them. As a stepping stone to learning full bar chords, hopefully you know how to play your major open cord shape. We're going to take that cord and move it up one fret. But we're also going to use different fingering to allow our index finger to be free, just like we did in the previous video lesson. Now we're going to slide that cord up one fret. Now instead of having your index finger across the entire neck, we're only going to borrow the first and the second strings. Then you're going to lift up your pinky and move your ring finger to the fourth string. Third fret. This is an F major half bar. You'll see there that I strum from strings four through one. Just like the bar chord shapes from our previous lesson, this major half bar chord shape is movable all over the fretboard. This half bar shape is a major shape. After giving this a try, I think you'll be able to tell that it's much easier to play than a full bord shape. To play a minor version of this shape, just lift up your middle finger and then bar one extra string with your index finger. The third string, you want to keep your ring finger down on the fourth string, third fret, and then you want to strum from the fourth string through the first string. By this point in the class, as we've moved back and forth between playing major and minor chords, hopefully you can hear the difference between the two Ir now let's look at another half bar cord shape. Remember how we build major cords starting from the fifth string based on the A major open cord shape. To turn this into a half bar cord, we're going to remove the index from the fifth string. Then we're going to press down on the first second with our index finger. Then we're going to from the fourth string through the first string to turn this into a minor half bar cord, you want to keep the index finger where it is on the first string. Second fret. Then move your middle finger to the second string. Third fret. Your ring finger is going to go to the fourth string. Fourth threat. Your pink is going to go to the third string. Fourth threat, you want to strum from strings four through one. Again, this is a half bar cord shape that comes out of the A minor open cord shape. In this case we're taking that a minor open shape and we split it up two frets and we added the index finger onto the first string, second fret. I want you to practice switching between these two half bar shapes. And of course both of these shapes are movable up and down the fret board fret. Here are some tips and tricks for playing bards. Make sure your thumb is pointed up like a thumbs up, and you want to place it in the middle of the neck as a starting point. This will help you to get more leverage and be able to squeeze your index finger across the fretboard to bar. Sometimes you might notice in this class that I wrap my thumb around to the front of the neck when playing certain bar chords. This is because I've been playing bar chords for a really long time, and I don't have to squeeze down as hard with my index finger and thumb to get a nice, clear sound. But if you're just starting out with bar chords, make sure your thumb is placed in the center of the neck for the best leverage. Also, make sure your left hand wrist is nice and relaxed. It's going to make it easier for you to play the bar chord shape and you'll also have a better tone whenever possible. When you're forming cords, you want to place your fingers down right behind the fret wire. This will give you the clearest tone with the least amount of effort. As you're learning all of these bar chord shapes, you should take a little inventory and figure out which bar chord shapes are giving you the most trouble. If you can identify what's giving you trouble, then you can spend a little bit extra of your practice time on that. It's a good idea to spend a little bit of time every day practicing the things on guitar that are giving you trouble that will help you make fast progress with your playing. You should also make sure that you try and play the bar chord shapes that we covered in this class up and down the fret board. There's everything you need to know to be able to play major and minor half bar chord shapes built on the sixth and the fifth strings. I'll see you in the next video where we're going to learn how to use a capo. 6. Using a Capo: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to use a Po. When you're playing bar chords, your index finger is actually taking on a lot of responsibility. Sometimes if you need to give your left hand a break, you can use a Po. A Po is a clamp that's fastened across all of the strings and it helps you to raise the tuning of your guitar by your chosen amount. Essentially, the Po takes on the role of the index finger when playing Bart. If a guitarist wants to play the open chords in the first position, and they want to move those shapes up the fret board, they'll just use a. You just clamp the Pow and then you play your open court shapes. The Po allows you to play those open court shapes without worrying about barring with the index finger. It takes the pressure off of playing bar shapes. If you need to give your left hand a break, essentially a Po allows you to modulate or to move to a higher or lower key. And all you have to do is take the O and put it onto your desired fret. You can also lower the Po, so there's a nice intro on how to use a K. I'll see you in the next video, where we're going to learn a new song to practice bar chords with. 7. Playing a Song With Barre Chords: In this lesson, we're going to learn a song that uses bar chords. This is one of the best ways to practice using bar chords. I've created an original song progression for you to practice with in this class. I've also created a chord chart PDF of this song for you to use as a resource in learning it. Let's go over the chords used in this song and the progression. Let's start with the verse section first, we have an F major bar. You can think about creating an major open. Then you want to switch the fingering up to free up your index finger. Then you slide your fingers up one fret and you bar the first fret with your index finger, You have an F major bar cord shape. Then we have the B flat major bar cord shape starting on the fifth string from the F bar, we shift our fingers down by one string each. Then we want to play our major bar cord shape that starts on the fifth string. Remember you have the option to bar strings 23.4 with your ring finger. For this, you want to strum from strings five through one. The next is a major bar. To play major, all we have to do is slide up two frets so that your index finger is barring there's your major bar. Then we go back to the B flat major bar chord. And those are the chords for the verse, for the strumming and the verse, we're going to use all down strums with a combination of whole notes and half notes. Let's go over the strumming and the rhythms for each chord. We start with a whole note on 1234, then we have a bar with two beats on and two beats on B flat, bar 234. Then we have a bar where it's a whole note on 1234. And then for bar four, we have two beats on C, 12.2 beats on B flat 34. Those are the chords and the strumming for the verse. We want to repeat the verse four times. Let's try playing the verse together. 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 4, 1, 2, 3 4 1 2 4 1, 2 3 4 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 4 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 2 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 4 2, 4, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 4. Now let's go over the chords of the chorus. We start with a D minor bar chord built off of the fifth string, coming off of the last chord in the verse, the B flap major. We slide up so that your index finger is barring the fifth thread. Now we have to turn this shape into a minor bard. We'll press down on the second string. Six fret with our middle finger. Our ring finger will press down on the fourth string. Seven Threat. Our pinky will press down on the third string. Seventh threat. Then we're going to strum from strings five through one. From there we go back to the B flat major bar ord. Back on the first fret, we play D minor to B flat three times here. Then we move to an A minor bar chord shape. Starting on the sixth string, we slide our hand up so that we're barring the fifth threat across all six strings. Then our ring finger goes onto the fifth string. Seven Threat, our pinky goes onto the fourth string. Seven Threat, we're going to St six strings. From there we play our major bard shape built on the fifth string. Third threat, it's the same shape from the verse section. Then we end this section on the major bar chord shape built on the six string first fret. That's the same F major barord shape that we played in the verse. For the strumming in the chorus section, we're going to use all down strums with a combination of half notes, whole notes, and quarter notes. Let's go over the strumming and rhythms for each. We start with two beats on D minor to two beats on B flat major four. Then we repeat that two more times, 2424, Then we have a whole note on A minor, and we repeat that again, 234. Then we have 2 bars of C and we play for 44 notes per bar, and then we end on a whole note on 1234. Those are the chords and the strumming for the chorus. Let's try to play the chorus together. Now let's try to put the verse and the chorus together. We'll repeat the verse four times and then play the chorus one time ending on that F major bar chord. Get your F major bard ready and I'll count us in. 1234. Second time three, Third time three, last time, three. Great job. Don't forget to download the PDF that I created for this song. Most importantly, don't forget to have fun learning this tune and practicing your bar court shapes. 8. Final Thoughts: Okay, That wraps up our bar cords course. Thank you so much for joining me here. I hope that you had fun in this class, and I hope that you've gained a really solid footing for learning bar cords. Here are some final notes about learning bar cords. Be patient with yourself while learning these chords. It takes time to build up the muscle memory and the strength to be able to play these bards comfortably. Make sure that you experiment and play all of the bar cord shapes that we covered in this class up and down the Fred. Also, you should try to pick up the guitar every day if you can. This will help you to build up strength, especially in your fretting hand. And regular playing and practice will also help to build up your muscle memory. When it comes to this class, you can come back to any of the lessons and review it as many times as you need to until the material really sinks in. And definitely take advantage of the opportunities to jam along with me in the video lessons. Just do your best and don't forget to have fun. Also, don't forget to download the supplemental materials that I've created for this class. I hope you enjoyed this course. I have other classes on guitar, Ucolele, and songwriting. And if you enjoy this class, I recommend that you check out my other classes as well. Music is an infinite subject, and the more that we learn about playing guitar and creating music, the more freedom we have to express our own creativity. Thank you so much for joining me. Have fun, and I hope to see you in another class soon.