Hello my friends, it's Justin again coming for the first solo video lesson
meaning that I'm by myself not that it's about lead guitar.
And what this lesson's going to be about is barre chords.
A lot of people, when they first start playing barre chords,
say they have a bit of difficulty trying to get all the notes clear and clean.
So I'm going to try to explain to you where the barre chords come from.
The basic kind of shapes like you might have learned an F chord,
it's called an E shape barre chord.
But I'll give you a few tips on making sure that you get
the fingering kind of good for that.
The first thing is, I've already mentioned it before, it's an E shape.
So the very first barre chord shape that most people learn
is based really by playing a regular E chord,
which I'm hoping you know, you should know your E chord good
before you try a barre chord with an E shape.
If you refinger that chord, i.e. change the fingers that
you use, but keep the dots the same.
So you end up using your second, third and fourth fingers
and your first finger is free.
I'm going to go for a closeup in a sec, I just have to figure
out how to do that in a sec.
Once that chord shape is down if you move that shape up
and put your first finger down, your first finger is replacing the nut.
The nut is the little plastic or bone usually white thing down at
the end of the guitar neck.
So you can see very clearly that we've got and E chord,
if we move up everything up one fret and then put your first finger
on the first fret, your first finger has replaced the nut.
And the reason it's an F chord is because it's all the same notes
just everything has been moved higher by one semi-tone.
So, now I'm just going to give you a closeup of that,
exactly this E to F movement. And then we'll move it up to an
A or something and I'll give you some stuff.
So I'll get my fancy remote control thing here, and see if I can
figure out how to get the camera to do a closeup on my hand.
So I'll see you guys in a sec.
OK, that didn't seem too bad, so here we are in a closeup.
So if we start here with our regular old faithful E chord.
So we've got first finger, first fret, third string.
Second finger, second fret, fifth string.
Third finger, underneath.
Remember of course you are trying to get this finger up as close
to the fret as you can, but you can't get it right
next door because the third finger is kind of blocking the way a bit.
So that's your basic E chord.
Your first attempt at playing a barre chord, you should try
move your second finger to where your first finger was.
Your third finger moves to where your second finger was.
Your little finger sneaks up there underneath.
So you've now got, second finger, first fret, third string.
Third finger, on the fifth string second fret. And little finger underneath on the
fourth string. So you can see now that your first finger
is free to wave and do little stupid dances and stuff. OK.
So that's your E chord. To get to F you move all of those
notes up one fret, and the first finger now goes down and covers
all of the strings. Now even that's covering all of the strings because
your second, third, and fourth finger covering strings three, four, and five.
You only really needed to cover the thickest string and the
thinnest two strings.
But in order to do that you kind of want to put your pressure
focus your pressure like it's here in the middle of the barre.
That's the place that you kind of focus your energy.
I know that sounds a bit funny, hippy stuff.
But if you think about pressing down in the middle of the finger,
it will make the two ends help press down, kind of consistently.
Now the other thing with barre chords that's really important:
the second, third and fourth fingers are kind of standard.
Make sure that they are pressing down and not trying to lay over like that.
Regular E, moving up to F.
Now when you put the barre down don't try and press down flat down that way
with the first finger.
Actually what you're trying to do here is you're trying to roll over
the part of your finger, there's my hand.
The part of the finger that presses down for the barre is here,
It's not the flat like this. It's not that part there that presses
it's this kind of on the diagonal of your finger, the edge.
So what you do is you put your first finger down flat kind of
right on the barre itself.
So that would be behind the barre, you can see the barre there now.
So this is like right on the barre.
And then you roll it slightly onto the side, and then your fingers go down.
Now by doing that, as you probably know, your first finger doesn't really
want to move a lot either way sideways. I know you can move it a little bit,
but It doesn't tend to want to.
So if you're trying to think of your barre chord grip like this,
then when you're trying to, if you're trying to turn your hand that way
on the guitar neck here, so this way.
You're putting the pressure sideways with the first finger.
Think of the pressure as going sideways. Not going straight down.
It will make it an awful lot easier to get your barre chord really solid.
So put it down on the fret roll it over onto the side,
so to kind of like 45 degrees, it's not the side side.
And then put your other fingers down.
Make sure of course you practice doing picking your notes one at a time.
Making sure you get a nice clear chord.
Also make sure that your first finger isn't hanging over the end too much.
I see some people trying to do their barre chords with way too much
of the first finger flopping over.
So, keep it down so that basically the idea would be if you moved it down
to the fifth string root barre chord, which we're not going to talk about yet,
but if you did, the first finger, the tip of it would be muting the sixth string.
But we want it, you know, half a centimeter over the end,
you know that 's like a quarter of an inch or something like that
for you Americans who don't have the metric system going on yet.
OK, so, the main thing with the barre chord is making sure you put it flat,
roll it over onto the side, keep the pressure focused in
the middle of your first finger, and make sure the rest of your fingers
is square and not laid over like that.
Make sure that they kind of square up like that.
It was too long, please join me
for Part two.