Learn the Trick to Playing Every Chord with Barre Chords
To really progress as a guitarist, a technique known as barre chords allows you to play dozens of chords using simple moveable shapes. Learning barre chords will give you the power to play nearly every song that was ever written! That’s right, barre chords are very handy, and an aspiring guitarist’s best friend! Barre chords are chord shapes where our first finger plays more than one string. There are two common barre chord shapes, the E shape and the A shape. Sound familiar? Well, barre chords are the expanded, more detailed version of power chords. Where power chords are simplified and feature a reduced number of notes, barre chords use the same shape and notes as open chords. The only difference is you use your first finger to barre across the open strings. One way to think of barre chords is to imagine your finger as a capo, moving the nut along the neck to change the pitch of the chord you play, depending where on the neck you play it.
Let’s start by learning how to barre across all the strings with our first finger. Place your first finger on the 3 rd fret and cover all the strings.
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Your finger should be parallel to the frets and pressed firmly across all the strings. Don’t hang the tip of your finger too far over the neck. Now try strumming the guitar to see if all the notes make a sound. It can be difficult to get all the strings to sound clearly at first, so have a few attempts, then run through the following checklist for clear barring:
Make sure that your elbow is pushed slightly away from your body. The tendency for most people is to pull their elbow towards their body, which can make it difficult to keep the finger flat and straight.
Focus on getting even pressure along your finger and across all the strings. It’s often harder initially to press the lower part of your finger down firmly enough to make the G, B and E strings sound clearly, but keep at it.
Your thumb should be applying pressure to the centre of the neck and will naturally turn slightly on its side.
Barre chords are tough to begin with, but after a few attempts you’ll find it becomes easier. Be careful not to apply too much pressure, and take a break if your hand gets tired or sore.
Pro Guitar Tip
Check the height of your strings above the fingerboard. A guitar with a high string action will make it harder to play barre chords, as your hand has to push the string down further to create clear sounding strings. A lower action helps you avoid sore and cramped fingers, and will allow you to progress faster and with less frustration.
6th String Root (E Shape) Barre Chord
With your first finger comfortable barring across all the strings, let’s learn an actual barre chord. We’ll start with the 6 th string root E shape barre chord. To begin, play the open E chord, but change your fingering so that your first finger is free to barre. Your little finger may be reluctant to become part of the action, so don’t stress if you find it won’t do what you’re asking it to. Sometimes people take a while to learn how to control their little finger.
Now if we move this shape one fret towards the guitar body and place our first finger across the 1st fret, we’ll create an F Major chord.
F Major Barre Chord
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Try the F barre chord, and compare your sound to my audio example. Nearly everyone learning barre chords has difficulties initially with getting muted sounds instead of a clear chord. Usually, either their fingers are not pressing the notes hard enough, or the second and fourth fingers lean over and mute the other strings.
To check up on your sound, try using the same arpeggio technique we learned when playing open chords, and play each string individually to make sure it rings true.
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The next chord diagram is an easier, simplified version of the F chord. You only play from the 4th string, and don’t have to barre across all the strings. Many beginners learn this shape first, and it’s useful to know. I encourage people to learn the whole shape first, but play the simplified version if required.
Like we experienced with power chords, we can now move this shape up the whole fingerboard to create all the other (E shape) Major barre chords. Another cross over from power chords is the naming convention – the names of barre chords also come from their bass string root note. So you can expand all those power chord positions you know with full barre chords. To begin with, we started with the open E chord using different fingering. Notice that the E repeats at the 12 th fret – one octave higher.
Next, we moved the shape up one fret and learned F Major.
If you move this shape up two frets, you create a G Major.
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Up two more frets to the 5th fret, and we create an A Major.
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See the pattern? It’s awesome how versatile barre chords are. Check out the bass string notes – you can move the shape anywhere on the fingerboard and create a Major chord!
Now here’s a little test. If you played the 6th string root barre chord on the 10th fret, what Major chord would you be playing? (Don’t look at the answer yet!)
Hint – Look at the bass string notes and count to the 10th fret.
Answer – D Major
Try the following two exercises to practice moving between 6th string root barre chords.
Use any strumming pattern you wish on this one, just be sure you stay in time whilst trying to play smoothly. To help you memorize the chord positions, try saying the chord names out loud as you practice.
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Using sharps and flats
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Pro Guitar Tip
Use the chord charts on the previous page and look at the bass string notes to get comfortable with the position of the chords. Remember SHARP means one fret to the right (towards your body or the guitar body) and FLAT means one fret to the left (away from your body or towards the headstock).
Try a simple song idea moving the 6th string root barre chords
This might remind you of a very basic version of the chorus to ‘Wild Thing’.
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Strum two down strokes every chord, and make sure you stay in time – even if that means playing very slowly to start with.
5th String Root (A Shape) Barre Chord
Once again we’ll start with the open Major chord and change the fingering – although this time we’re using the A Major shape.
Then move the A shape up two frets, use your first finger to barre across the 2nd fret, and you’ve created a B Major.
B Major (A Shape Barre Chord)
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Remember how with the A Major open chord you only play five strings? The same applies to the A shape barre chord, so leave the 6th string and just strum from the 5th string.
Note: If we had moved the A shape up one fret, we would have played an A# or Bb Major chord.
Pro Guitar Tip
I play the A shape barre chord in a simplified fashion by only using my first and third fingers, using the third finger to barre across the 2nd , 3rd and 4th strings.
Notice with the tab notation that you only want the middle four strings to sound. You can actually mute the 6th and 1st string with your fingers. The tip of the first finger mutes the 6th string, and the skin half way down your third finger mutes the 1 st string by resting over the top of the it. I know this seems difficult, and can be tricky to begin with, but experiment and see what’s best for you. I don’t mind if you break all the rules, as long as it sounds great!
Like we experienced with power chords and the E shape barre chord, we can now move this shape up the whole fingerboard to create all the other A shape Major barre chords. Remember how the names of barre chords also come from their bass string root note? Well, the root note for the A shape is found on the 5 th string. Once again, you can utilize all those power chord positions you know with full barre chords. To begin with, we started with the open A chord using different fingering. Notice that the A repeats at the 12th fret – one octave higher.
Then we moved the shape up two frets to create a B Major chord.
If you move the shape up one more fret you create C Major.
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Shift the shape two more frets to the 5th fret and you’ve created D Major.
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Feeling familiar, right? The A shape works in the same way as the E shape that we just covered. You can move the A shape up and down the fingerboard, naming the chord from the 5th string note.
To help you get comfortable with the A shape barre chord, let’s play though a couple of progressions that feature a variety of fingerboard positions.
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Many of the songs you’ll come across will feature chord progressions that change from the E shape to the A shape directly underneath. This is known as an interval called a 4th . An interval describes the distance between two notes. In the dominant 7th open chord section, we looked at the blues chord progression, chords I, IV and V. The connection between these chords is very common in popular music. Let’s look at a I, IV, I, V, I, IV, V chord progression in A Major.
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See the connection between the shapes and position of the chords? Using the same shapes, you can move the example anywhere on the fingerboard to play all possible I, IV, V progressions.
This little ditty is based around a G blues turnaround chord progression. Notice that I’ve indicated the chord numbers underneath the exercise.
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The relationship between the I, IV and V chords and their position on the fingerboard forms a pattern, which can be applied to any position on the guitar. Play through a few times until you can feel the pattern unfolding, and your fingers almost move automatically to the right place.
This may remind you of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana
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In the actual song, the chords are played as more stripped down, power chord versions, with a cool rhythm. Have a listen to the real recording if you’d like to emulate Kurt Cobain’s famous playing.
Using Barre Chords to Play all other Chord Types
The variations available with open E and A chords can be applied to their corresponding barre chord shapes – we can make 7th chords, minor, minor 7 etc. It’s another incentive to memorize all your open chord shapes! Let’s look at how we can change a major barre chord to a minor as an example.
E Shape Major
E Shape minor
So to make the E Major barre chord shape into a minor shape you simply remove your second finger. This creates the same shape as the Em open chord we learned earlier, and will turn all the E Major barre chords into minor chords. You’ve now got the skills to play any type of chord using the 6th string root E shape. Here are four common 6th string root E chord shapes you can start to move around.
A Shape Major
We can apply exactly the same principle to the 5th string root A shape bar chord if we think of it purely as a shape.
To change the A Major shape into the minor version, we change our fingering to place the second finger one fret closer to our barring first finger. Here, we’re making the A minor shape from our open chord lessons. Like with the E shape, we can now play any of the A shape Major chords as minor chords by using this minor chord fingering.
A Shape Minor
Here are the four most common 5th string root A shape chords.
To explore all the other chord variations that can expand barre chords, refer to the Complete Chord Chart. Using your knowledge of where the root note from the chord shape, you can now move the two different barre chord shapes around the guitar fingerboard to work out the complete range of barre chords. I recommend referring to the complete notes of the guitar fingerboard from the Extras section to help you find the root note of the chord you’re wanting to play.
Pro Guitar Tip
Time spent learning barre chords has paid dividends for me throughout my music career. I really recommend you get acquainted with the different shapes, and enjoy being able to play a huge variety of songs. Have fun with this technique to listen to and work out any song. Maybe you can even start experimenting with some songwriting ideas to really push your playing.
Pro Guitar Tip
Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to play barre chords perfectly straight away. They take practice to build up the strength necessary to make them sound great, but one day it will all just gel. Even after playing guitar for nearly 20 years, my hands and forearms get sore playing barre chords for extended periods of time. To prevent getting frustrated, play for short bursts – a short, quality practice session will beat a long average one hands down.
Pro Guitar Tip
Mixing barre chords with open position chords is a great way to rest your hands. When you’re jamming on a song, mix a few open chords in with any bar chords. It’ll help prevent your hands from getting fatigued.
Bar Chord Practice Lesson
The best way to practice bar chords is to play them in songs, rather than trudge through exercises. However, before you jump into playing songs, this lesson is designed to get your hands moving and your brain processing barre chord positions. It will help you learn to play songs quicker as you become familiar with the chord changes.
Write down as many different chord change patterns as you can think of. Then play through them using a metronome to stay in time. Make sure you use barre chords for all the chords, and choose which shape chord to use – E or A. Play the shape that’s closest to the last chord you played. For example, there’s no point jumping from an F major on the 1 st fret (E shape) to a C on the 8 th fret (E shape) when you can play C using the A shape on the 3 rd fret.
Here’s one to get you started, try strumming four times on each chord.
C / / /, A / / /, Em / / /, G / / /.
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A few examples feature below, but you should write some down yourself to start hearing which chords sound good together, and which chords seem to clash.
F, Bb, C, F
F7, Bb7, C7, F
Fm, Bbm, Cm, Fm
Fm7, Bbm7, Cm7, Fm7
A, E, D, A
A7, E7, D7, A7
Am, Em, Dm, Am
Am7, Em7, Dm7, Am7
G, D7, Am7, Bm7
E, Dm7, A7, C
G#, D#7, A#m7, Cm7
Eb, Dbm7, Ab7, B
The flexibility of barre chords is fantastic! Barre chords will give you the confidence to say “Hey, I can play that chord” no matter what a song or jamming musician throws at you. Now grab your guitar and have some fun!
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