Barre (or Bar) Chords

There are loads of resources out there for this and this blog isn’t about teaching. But there are a few things that really helped me personally with these and took me from “I HATE these blasted things” to “Oooh they are so cool”! I wanted to at least pass them on.

The first was starting early to build my strength up, it took forever, so don’t lose heart if you’ve been trying for ages and still not got there. Two things I particularly found helpful was 1) paying attention to the exact finger positioning, sounding each note then holding for as long as I could, shake it off, rest, repeat. I did that every day and I noticed the change quite quickly. 2) Pulling in with my arm muscles not pushing with my finger. I saw it recommended by one teacher online, tried it and it helps so much. Don’t go mad it doesn’t take much, be gentle, just use your natural body strength instead of trying to squeeze the strings which won’t work.

Then there is changing – this took me FOREVER. ARGH, it was so so so frustrating trying to get from one barre to another let alone from an open chord to a barre. Here I’m sorry to say it’s practice practice practice but I did find one cool song that uses changes down the fretboard so it’s great for practicing.

It’s - Time warp! Yay so much fun. The main “Let’s do the time warp again” is simply F, C, G, D, A. All major chords so you’ll be bouncing up and down the 6th and 5th string and changing barre shape. Try it – it’s very cool!

Other than that my only other tip is to play fingerpicking songs with barres in them. My teacher wrote a doozy for me, it was HARD but I made huge progress very quickly thanks to him. I’m afraid you’ll have to read lots and lots of different advice on these and see what fits you. And practice – sorry no quick way out of this one. I’m still working on perfecting these with a long way to go.