A Beginner’s Guide to Bar Chords

A Beginner’s Guide to Bar Chords

As you develop as a guitarist, you will start to learn things of increasing difficulty. Out of everything you will learn, the one thing that new guitarists struggle the most with is how to play a bar chord.

If you don’t already know, a bar chord is when you play more than one string with a single finger. The two most common bar chord types require you to play either 5 or 6 strings simultaneously.

This lesson aims to teach you the fundamentals of how to play a bar chord, as well as the eight most commonly used bar chord shapes.

Practice makes perfect

Almost no one gets a bar chord sounding great the first few times they play them. In fact, when we asked one of our in-store music teachers how long the average student takes to master bar chords, he told us that it takes a few weeks of continuous practice before most students become comfortable with bar chords.

Learn One - Know 12

The great thing about bar chords is that you can move them up and down the guitar neck. That means that once you learn one shape, let’s say the major shape, you can move that shape up the fretboard, and play every major chord chromatically.

Voicings

One of the biggest advantages of learning to play bar chords is learning how to play new chord voicings.

A chord voicing is when we play the same chord in two different places on the guitar neck. While the primary notes for each voicing remain the same, the overall tonality for each voicing will vary slightly.

A skilled guitarist will have a working knowledge of multiple voicings to ensure that they can use the right sound for a specific piece of music.

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Naming Conventions

When we see a chord written down, there are two things that we look at. The name of the chord, and the shape.

If we look at Gm, we know that the root note is G, and that the shape is minor. So, if you want to play a Gm chord, first, find the G note on the fretboard. The most commonly played G note is the third fret on the low E-String.

Once you’ve found the note you want to play, you play the right chord shape (listed below).

E-String Voicings

When we talk about E-string voicings, we are referring to chords with that start on the low E-string.

A-String Voicings

When we talk about E-string voicings, we are referring to chords with that start on the low E-string.

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