So, you’ve been playing guitar for a little while and got to grips with the basic open chords. Well done! What’s next?

Well, sadly, not everything in guitar is a smooth progression. There are times when the gap between where you are currently and where you need to go next feels like a jump rather than a step. Barre chords is one of these times. When coming out of that early beginner stage, it is perhaps the single biggest technical hurdle.

Hey man, shut up and just show me your barre chord tips (skips to tip#1)

But the great thing is, once you master them, barre chords really blow your chord game wide open. Almost instantly you can play many of those chords you see that have harder names. Chords that, right now, probably have you scratching your head. Bb? No problem. G#m? Easy. Ebmaj7? Walk in the park.

However, to get to that point, you need to pay a toll, which is mastering the barre chord technique.

If you feel this technique has taken the wind out of your sails and like you have suddenly hit a wall with this, don’t despair. You felt guitar was going pretty well, now you don’t know if you can get any further? That’s normal. You can. But it’s true that barre chords represent a big jump up in difficulty from open chords. 

Likely the first barre chord you’ve encountered is F – ‘the dreaded F chord’. Yes, there are some ‘easy’ F’s you can play, but that’s not really why you’re here, is it? You want to overcome the problem and master the technique to be able to play full F. I get it.

I’m going to show you some tips to hopefully help you out and make this progression a little easier. First, let’s run over a quick definition so we’re clear what we’re talking about:

What are open chords?

Open chords refers to beginner chords that use one or more ‘open’ strings to sound notes, i.e. chords like E, A, C, G, D, Am, Em, and so on. In an open chord, the un fretted strings are doing some of the work for you.

What are barre chords?

Barre chords are chords that are formed by ‘barring’ the open strings to raise their pitch. Then, in front of this ‘bar’, you put your other fingers to form a chord shape.

Barre chords are just opened chords pushed up the neck.

For example, F is just E but moved up one fret.The first finger barres the strings at the first fret which raises the pitch of all strings by one to match. You can see the ‘shape’ is identical in the diagram below:

[fig]

It’s the same if we take another barre chord, B. It’s the same as A, but moved up two frets. 

[fig]

Don’t worry about the theory of this right now; just observe that it is the case. The logic of barre chords is that your finger is replacing the nut of the guitar and moving all the strings up in pitch. Today we are only thinking about the physical technique to achieve this.

What makes barre chords hard is having to get all the strings to ring out clearly. To press every string down sufficiently for it to sound, while not muting any neighbouring strings. And to do this without crippling your hand with an excessive, vice like grip.

It’s a challenge at first but it’s 100% doable. 

Concentrate force

In guitar technique, efficiency is everything. That means deploying the minimum effort to get the result, and ruthlessly eliminating excess tension and pointless movement. Let’s take a closer look at F. Because, if we break it down intelligently, the barring required is not as bad as it looks or sounds.

Strings 5(A), 4(D) and 3(G) are fretted by other fingers. That means only strings E(6) 2(B) and 1(E) are fretted by the first finger. So, even though everyone says we’re barring all the strings (and I just did too, for ease of explaining what a barre chord is), you’re actually not. There is no need to burst a blood vessel trying to hold all strings perfectly fretted with the first finger. That would be wasting energy.

Concentrate the force of your barre into the strings that actually need to be held down; in this case the 6th, 2nd and 1st. How? Just by thinking in your mind that’s what you want to do. Your muscles will then start to adapt accordingly. It’s like if you think “I want to move my pinky”, your pinky moves. You don’t consciously think of moving the muscles involved. You just picture a goal or outcome, and your hands find the way. It works like that. This is helped along by the next thing:

Arc your finger

Since force is not required equally across the barre, there is no reason to maintain a rigidly flat angle on all the strings. In fact, this is counter productive. It causes excess tension and is tiring to maintain, and it impedes the movement of your other fingers. 

The ideal first finger position is with a slight curve or arc. This way, the tension is at maximum on the outer strings, and minimum on the inner strings. This is perfectly in line with what you need to have happen, as the inner strings are fretted by other fingers.

While you arc, there’s another little position tweak you can make that goes hand in hand:

Bone up

If you just barre straight down onto the strings, your finger contacts the strings with the fat padded parts of the inner finger. These are spongy, and you have to push them in a good few millimetres more before you meet resistance. This means you have to push extra hard or you’ll get dull, muted notes, as the string sinks into the pillow of this extra skin and fat (sorry).

The solution? Applying a slight amount of rotation to the first finger. Don’t over do this or over interpret what I’m saying. It doesn’t take much at all. A slight tilt of that first finger by even a few degrees will mean a harder part of your finger is making more contact with the strings. If you hold your hand in front of you with your palm facing down to the floor, and run a finger along the edge of first finger, you’ll see what I mean. The bone is much more prominent, which makes for easier and more reliable barring. Again, don’t over do this, you’re just tilting towards this bonier side in a way that is not uncomfortable, yet gives you a slight but noticeable advantage.

Avoid the grooves

While we’re thinking about positioning, it’s worth adding one quick point. On the underside of the finger, you’ll see there are little grooves or channels under each knuckle where your fingers bend. Make sure you line things up so you’re not getting these trapped over critical strings that need to be barred. This is quite a common thing to do. People will come straight down on a critical string, but the part of the finger making contact is one of these grooves. Especially common is to catch the 6th string or the 1st string under a groove. It just means you’re more likely to get a duff note, because the contact isn’t as good, and it can also be quite sore because the skin here is really thin.

This is not a huge thing but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless. At least half of doing things right is not making mistakes, and this is a common one. Next up, divide and conquer:

Practice open chords with weak fingers

We’ve talked a lot about the first finger barre a lot so far. In fact, it’s all we have talked about. But what about the other fingers? Barre chording is a two part task, two actions combined – first, barring with the first finger, then, with the other fingers, forming a chord shape ‘in front’ of the barre.

We can directly practice and improve on the second part by deliberately practicing familiar open chords without the first finger. This might feel super weird at first. Caveat: I wouldn’t suggest doing this unless you are completely on top of your open chords. If you’re still shaky on open chords, and it has taken you a while to get them together, then this is just going to mess up your fingerings and brain signals.

Take some common open chords – A E D G C, Am, Dm, Em – and work on them using only your 2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers. No index (1st) finger. Put them together and change between them. If you find this is hard, then that’s actually a good discovery. It shows you that you could do with boosting this skill, because this is what your hand needs to do when playing barres. You can practice it directly, separately from barring. This will allow you to make faster gains.

Practice with a Capo

One of the cruel ironies of learning barre chords is that the first one you encounter, F, is one of the hardest to play on the entire guitar. This is because the fret spaces are as large as they’re ever going to be, down there at the lowest point on the neck.

A great tool here is the capo. Place the capo somewhere further up the neck, like the 7th fret, and then practice your barre chords up here. Just imagine the capo as having ‘reset’ the lowest point on the guitar. Two things happen that help you – 1) The fret gaps are significantly smaller, making it less of a big stretch, and 2) The strings are pushed much closer to the frets, meaning they take much less force to fret cleanly. This allows you to work on your technique in an easier context. You can then progress downwards with the capo one fret at a time, which naturally increases the difficulty step by step.

And that’s what I have for you. In summary, to crack barre chords, do these things:

Barre Chord Tips Summary

1. Concentrate your force on the strings that actually need to be fretted
2. Arc your first finger to apply more pressure to the ‘open’ outer strings
3. Tilt your first finger to get more bone-side contact and less skin-side contact 
4. Avoid the grooves so the strings don’t get caught in between knuckles 
5. Simulate the shape in front of the barre by practising open chord fingerings
6. Use a capo to train higher up where frets are smaller and less force needed to fret 

These barre chord practice strategies are like having a toolbox or armoury of tactics. Some of them are pretty small, but when you combine all of them together it can make a huge difference – even if you only get a tiny bit better at each individual thing.

So try it out, and let me know how you get on!