There's nothing like a weekend at the woodshed right? I hope you were able to jump headlong into all of the chords we've learned so far and get some serious practice in. If you're ready, I think it's time to push on to the next lesson. If you need some more time, that's no problem at all. It would be far more beneficial to go at your own pace in each lesson until you feel like you have mastered that particular lesson.
Today we are going to take a look at some other barre chords and how to implement them into our chord vocabulary.
Picking up right where we left off, let's jump right into some tabs for 5 string barre chord shapes. Note: We are going to change up our tabs just a bit. In the first lesson that I introduced tabs, we used an 'x' to indicate a string that was not being played. Now we are just going to leave that particualr string blank when we do not want a note to be played on that string.
This is a Bm chord.
----2----
----3----
----4----
----4----
----2----
---------
Once again, the index finger is used to barre the strings on the second fret and individual notes are fingered as normal. This is what the shape looks like accross the 3 frets used.
|--2--|-----|------|
|--2--|--3--|------|
|--2--|-----|--4---|
|--2--|-----|--4---|
|--2--|-----|------|
|-----|-----|------|
Just like our six string barre chords that we studied in the last lesson, the 5 string barre chords take the shape of an open chord (in this case Am) and allow you to move it up and down the fretboard to play any minor chord with this same shape. You will notice that this shape feels exactly like the 6 string major barre chord shape, just with every thing moved up one string. Well....that is all that it is. If you can play the 6 string major barre chords, then you can move them up one string and voila...you've got the 5 string minor barre chord.
Now let's pull up a 5 string major barre chord...here's the tab for a B major 5 string barre chord.
----2----
----4----
----4----
----4----
----2----
---------
That's a lot of repeating numbers. So how do we approach this? Well....you barre with two fingers. Now, I know someone will say, "Can't we just barre the second fret and finger the other notes individually?" Absolutely. We -could- do that. But honestly it doesn't help you in the long run.
When you start playing these kind of chords in the upper frets (past the 12th fret), fret space seems to get a little tight. You don't want to have to try and cleanly intonate 3 strings right beside each other on the same fret with 3 separate fingers. If you have large hands like me, it simply won't work. Another disadvantage is you tie up those 3 fingers when it only takes 1 to do the work. Why not work more efficiently and use 1 finger that will free up the other 2 to add embellishments?
As per usual, this chord shape can be moved up and down the fretboard to play any major chord. Let's try a chord progression with nothing but barre chords.
----1-------3-------5------1-----
----1-------5-------6------3-----
----2-------5-------7------3-----
----3-------5-------7------3-----
----3-------3-------5------1-----
----1------------------------------
Starting to all make sense? Now that we know these chords and the open chord shapes, we can now play thousands if not millions of songs. Remember that these barre shapes( any variation that we learned about) are movable to fit any key.
This lesson is short and sweet because we're going back into theory tomorrow. DON'T RUN!! We're going to jump into the cicrle of 5th's, intervals and establishing the key. Hope to see you back.
man! take a short break from the computer and you miss 3 lessons just like that! btw, and this would probably have been a better question to ask on the last post (at least i think it was the last one... the one where u touched on capos). when you do the capo lesson are you going to touch on the use of cut capos? i liked using it but the chart i had for the cut capo chords seemed rather limited and i don't know if it IS that limited by design or if there are more options for chords that i just don't know about.
ReplyDeleteand now that you've probably tripled or quadrupled my working knowledge of barre chords, i better get that lost weekend of practice back and catch up!
Haha, yeh they roll out fairly quick. It's a good thing they are archived and aren't going to be lost forever, barring (heh) Al Gore doesn't shut down the internet. I will be touching on cut capos and all sorts of other capo tricks, as well as the disadvantages to capos/cut capos. I love some of the things you can do with capos and I think they are highly underrated as a tool.
ReplyDeletehope you aren't offended that i was just reading your comment while listening to arcade fire :)
ReplyDeletei have several guitarist friends that sort of turn their noses up at capos because it's like cheating... like they're these big music purists... one of them also has great disdain for tabs because he thinks if you're going to learn somebody's songs, you should take the time and effort to learn how to read music. he's pretty hardcore about that sort of thing. but he lives in lebanon now (again), so considering all he's had to go through there, i let him have his opinion without any backtalk from me :)
Lol not offended at all, they just aren't my cup of tea. As for the capo, like I said earlier. It's just a tool available to use. Some people think using an air-nailer to build a house is cheating when you should use the hand hammer. Doesn't make a difference as long as it's a house in the end. The same goes for reading music over tabs...as long as the music is played, it doesn't matter how it was communicated to the musician. A listener won't be like "Oh, that was definitely played from a tab" haha.
ReplyDeletei don't think half the musicians that write songs know how to read music themselves. well, half was a pretty arbitrary number, but there are some - or a lot - that can't.
ReplyDeleteand my father in law is one of those anti-air nailer purists, btw :)