How to beat the biggest beginner guitarist’s arch enemy
For as long as I have been playing guitar, people have come up to me and talked about their own experience learning, attempting, or failing at learning the guitar. One of the most common points that people seemed to fail or quit at were bar chords. “I tried to learn guitar. But as soon as I got to bar chords, I gave up.” I have heard that so many times.
Bar Chords are Hard for Every Student
To be fair, when I was learning the guitar, it was no different. Teachers were a little different then, though. The conventional thought was to play an acoustic guitar with thick strings to make your hands strong. Then electric guitar would be super easy (which is only partially true).
My first teacher was no exception to this concept. You were basically supposed to grip the guitar with all your might until those elusive fingerings began to sound something like a chord. I felt like I might as well have been trying to crush a brick with my bare hands!
The Trick was Plain Old Patience, Time, and Work
Those who were willing to work at it learned to play. And they continued on to more advanced concepts. Those who gave up, generally gave up all together.
Bar chords are needed too much to completely avoid them. Once you get them, you have an endless list of songs you can play. It’s like taking the training wheels off. It’s very freeing. But if open chords were like basic military training, then bar chords were like navy seal training. There seemed to be a high quit and failure rate. Somehow, my 14-year-old self was willing to work hard enough not to wash out.
When I became a teacher, that all changed. Bar chords were no longer a badge of honor and accomplishment I could feel good about. As a student, I only had to worry about me succeeding at learning bar chords. As a teacher, I had to help other people succeed at playing them! Great! That’s like climbing mount Everest only to find out you need to start carrying others on your back the next time. Time to put my thinking cap on. How am I going to get people over this? Time to become a navy seal instructor.
The New Mechanics of Learning (and Teaching) Bar Chords
The most important thing about the bar chord is being able to lay your index finger flatly across all six strings on one fret. The index finger joints have to be pretty straight. This is how to evenly distribute enough pressure across the stings that they all ring out. This is physically counterintuitive. If you think about how we hold our hands, it’s not often that we extend our fingers completely. Generally, we have some kind of bend in the joint. Unless you are at a sporting event. “We’re number 1!” Or, someone cuts you off in traffic……
So, we have two contributing factors to think about here. Holding down more than one string with one finger. And keeping our finger straight. Wait! Holding down more than one string! How many strings? Six….. wait there are chords that don’t bar all six. Could we start with smaller bar chords? Of course! I did that with my teachers. Now, do I even have to start with a chord at all? Could I just focus on the first finger only and then do the chords later? Yes! Now I was on to something.
One drill my teachers would make me do was playing my chords one string at a time before strumming the full chord. To make sure all the notes came out clearly. What if I took that concept and put it into my new first-finger-only drills? That is exactly what I did. I came up with drills for the first finger only. Starting with just barring two strings. Then three strings. And I would do different groupings of three strings as well. I would start with strings E-B-G. Then B-G-D. Then G-D-A. And finally, 4-5-6. While the student only had to worry about barring three strings, they also were working on getting their index finger to straighten a bit. This would help for the bigger bars later on. On and on, the students would do these exercises. They weren’t complaining the way students use to about bar chords. Sure, they were hard. But they were doing the process in a gradual and tangible way. Once they could bar all six, I would work on some third-finger bar exercises. Those are easier as chords that require the third finger to bar are generally three-string bars. And on thinner strings.
Loving Bar Chords (Or at Least Living With Them)
Next, the students would do the actual bar chords. And all of a sudden, they stopped hating them. I once had an adult student that was retired. He had been playing a little bit of guitar on and off for 40+ years. He would always avoid bar chords. Only playing songs that didn’t use them. Which was very limiting for him. I gave him my method. He can now play bar chords! This works because it is developmental. You can play them! I have proof! And without navy seal training! I’ve proved it to you.
-JD
[JB1]Can you break this down into maybe 3 steps (with subheadings)? I don’t think I understand it enough to write them. You may also be able to break apart the paragraphs a little more.
[JB2]You can probably come up with something better.