Getting Started With Bar Chords

Just a little quick tip about bar chords in case that's an area that you're struggling with.

A lot of times people try to approach playing bar chords with the bar flat on, they'll try to approach hitting the strings flat on the finger.

What you want to do is angle the hand so that your strings are touching the side of the finger.

Once you get out of this front angle and switch to the side, things generally get a lot easier to squeeze and grip on the neck, and then your notes can come out a lot cleaner.

When you're practicing any challenging chord whether it's bar chords, jazz chords, seventh chords or anything else, we want to make sure that each note is coming out clear.

You can use your fingers or your pick to just go one by one.

Let's say I did that and something wasn't coming out clear.

If there's a note that's not perfectly coming out in your chord it's going to be one of two issues.

The first issue would be that the finger is not pressing hard enough.

If you're not pressing hard enough you're going to get this kind of buzz or sometimes just a click or something. So then you press a little harder and you get that note nice and clear

The other issue that would happen is, let's say I have my 4th finger on the 4th string but I'm angling it so that it touches the third-string. That would interfere with the note that I want to play on the third-string so I'd have to like wiggle around and angle it to make sure that the third-string is coming out clear.

Just remember that when we're dealing with difficult chords, if there's a note that's muted or buzzed it's going to be one of two issues, either you're not pressing hard enough with that finger or one of your other fingers is interfering with that note.