STOP Playing Bar Chords! Do THIS Instead!
Do you have a tough time playing bar chords?
Do they make your hand sore?
Do you find it impossible to make all of the notes ring clearly?
Does your inability to play them make you feel weak, pathetic, or even undeserving of love?Whoah, easy there!
No need to stake your self-esteem on bar chords. We all had problems with them!
You know what, I have a proposal that will instantaneously eliminate all of your struggles with bar chords, without any effort whatsoever.
I know that sounds hard to believe. But it’s totally true. And it will work so instantaneously that it will give you whiplash by how fast it and how completely it solves the problem.
And there it is:
Just don’t!
Don’t play them. Not one band, song, or recording needs a guitar strumming chords that take up two full octaves of space.
If you want to come up with interesting, memorable guitar parts that can actually be heard in the mix... bar chords are not and won't ever be the answer.
No producer has ever said “Oh good! A guitar part that takes up almost the entire frequency spectrum! This will be so easy to mix and EQ, and this whole song will benefit from having one instrument doing a job that could be done by three. I love my job!”
So, if you want to make guitar parts that are actually interesting, sit better in a mix, and don’t make producers regret not going to college, watch the video linked below and I’ll show you some much better ways to play chords around the fretboard!
Want to know more ways of moving chords around the fretboard? Or maybe you just want to understand how chords are constructed, or how to play 'fancy' chords? Check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course to massively improve your chord knowledge on the guitar!
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! If there is one thing that a lot of people are obsessed with but I personally hate is barre chords. Barre chords are not the easiest chord to play, okay? A lot of beginner intermediates are stuck on barre chords, even some advanced players can play a lot of other stuff perfectly well and their barre chords kind of suck, okay?
And honestly if I have to tell you the truth I don't think barre chords sound any good. People are obsessed with them, they don't think they aggregate our players if they cannot do a barre properly but for what?
I mean they really don't sound that good, okay? There are so many much better alternatives that we can use that will sound better in a band context, that will cut through the mix much better, that will make us sound more intelligent than just going okay?
So this is my hate letter to barre chords, okay? And now let me show you what I do instead. A student asked me exactly that how do we go from barre chords and and just just start standing him you want to move away from barre chords, forget all that stuff, okay?
Here's what sounds better than barre chords and if you are stuck on barre chords I would recommend all of this video and do that instead. I'm wondering just how do you think about other ways to approach you know those those those flavors chords?
I know you could get into you know extensions and things like that but you know started a little bit of work with the triads and the triad inversions. Yes. But I guess that doesn't really get into the seventh.
You need to move away from barre chords, okay? Now barre chords are okay, okay? But for instance I practically never use them, okay? There are usually too many notes. I mean if I am alone with just a singer, sure I'm using the barre chords, then I want to fill as much as possible.
But in literally any other situation, I don't want to use a barre chord. Too many notes, okay? I prefer to concentrate my sound on a specific frequency or area, so I can cut up the mix easily, okay? They're not gonna lower me because I'm all over the frequency and just ear and that's what I want to do.
One thing you could do is to start learning the triads on three strings. Okay. Now, that's not that hard because they're already not two out of three positions, right? Okay, so for instance Do you know how to play a C major chord as a barre chord?
As a barre chord? Yes. Yeah, so And yeah, you will have to leave the first string on the third fret, which is a bit hard to do with your barre in this way. Okay, wherever you have this barre chord with the bass in the fifth, you have this chord position on top.
Right, right, okay, yeah You see how they do it. Got it, yes. I see what you're saying, yeah, because I had that right. So, sure. That would be it. Now, do you know any other position for a C barre chord?
I guess from the sixth string. Yes. So, let's see. I don't know if I, so, yeah, yes, I do. Let's see. Very good. Exactly, now, can you take only the first three strings? So you don't need to finger the barre and do all the other notes, it's just the top three strings.
Okay. So you're missing only one position, okay? And the other position would be this. It's 12, 13, 12 in your situation. 12, 13, 12. Yes. So it looks like a D chord. Some people call it the D shape.
I mean, the D shape C chord is like, what? This is like a second inversion, right? You could call it second inversion because the lowest note, yeah, it's the G. You can call it this way. Consider that the bass player can play some other note, so the overall feeling of the inversion is different.
But if we talk only about the shape that you're playing, the pattern in the playing, yep, you can call this a second inversion. Okay. Personally, I prefer to call it the third on top because for me, it's more important to know what is the top note.
What is the top note? Yeah. But again, it's just names. Okay. Okay, it's important thing to know the positions. Okay. So you're gonna, every time you have the bass on the fifth string, you have a major chord in this position.
Right, right. Every time you have the bass in the sixth string, you have a major chord in this position. Okay. And technically speaking, this will be part of the barre chord with the root on the fourth string.
Right. Which you never learn because they are mighty uncomfortable to play. But technically it will be that. And so this is just. Okay. No, it's on top. But again, you can think of it either way. So I will start learning the chords then, that way.
What do I mean? I mean that I will take a chord chart, some simple pop song, really nothing much more, and I'll start thinking, can I play them using only chords on the top three strings? So it's like C, A minor, whatever, E minor, whatever, the G, whatever the chord progression is, and just trying to play these using only the top three.
And then try to use like the voice leading you were talking about a little bit more. Exactly. The closest one. The closest one, essentially. Now, when you're thinking about that closest one, do you basically look for the closest root?
You could do that. I'm just thinking, I mean, if I ever see here, I see here and I see here. My first chord is G. The closest C is here because this alternative here and this alternative here or down here are too far away from me, so I'm just picking the closest shape.
Okay. Okay. You always have three. If you have to move more than two frets, you're going too far. Right, right. Okay. Up or down. So that will be the idea. That's how you conceptualize the whole thing.
And that will stay on those chord charts. Okay, what I'm gonna say is very unpopular. People don't teach this way, but I will stay on a few chord charts until you can pretty much read the chord chart in real time and play those chords on top three strings.
You're just playing triads, so. Yes, you're just playing triads. Maybe you're a minor, basically, or maybe diminished. The thing is, once you know the triads, there are ways to play the seventh chord that are easy.
Okay, because you just need to play the triad a third higher. So I want to play C major seven. I just need to think, what's triad at the third higher than C major? It's E minor in the scale. Right. And I play E minor and let the bass player play C.
So I'm playing E minor, bass player play C, and boom, the combination of us is C major seven. Now, don't worry if you understood every single passage here. Yeah. Okay, it's a bit... No, I understood that concept.
But the idea is that I'm playing a different triad than the one written, and eventually you pretty much learn them, okay, to create the illusion of a seventh chord or a ninth chord or other things. Like a major seventh, you'd be picking a minor triad or...
After a major triad, a minor third above and so on and so forth. Yeah, so you can always do this kind of... That math, yeah, okay. Or I can play a triad of fifth, a boy who won the seventh and the ninth, but not the third, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay, so... So basically, if you're playing with a bass player, you're not really worried about playing the root, or you're just... Exactly. You play the top note. I mean, if you play just a triad, play the root too.
But if you play something else, you can find a triad that gives you the extension and let the bass player worry about the root note. All right. That makes me really want to learn triads. Yeah, yeah. Triads are the best, okay.
You can do so much with triads, okay. that's great so that's why you need to have this triad as familiar as you can okay as in real time as you can because later you want to put this math on top it's not really math as you're gonna see eventually but when I put this some math on top and you may have to play a different triad okay or sometimes you can modify the triads if I'm playing the C major chord I can also think okay I'm taking the root and moving it down one or two frets the one for the major seventh or two for the tommy on seventh.
Okay I want a fourth as for I can take the third and move it up or down for the second so you can start doing all this getting to know all those positions relative to the triad you already exactly so once you have the triad you have a reference point you know it sounds good and you can modify it in a number of ways to get all the other chords you want yeah makes sense so the triad are the basics The missing link is the practical stuff.
Meaning look at the chord chart, play it immediately. So it takes a bit of training, but once you gain that skill, then we can start adding up all the rest. And it feels much better because now you know you can play, you have a face safe, I can go back to the triads in time, but you can start thinking about making it sound better.
Alright, cool. I like it. That's your task, so you choose to accept it would be to do that. Okay, very good. Thank you. Thank you very much.