Barre Chords Pdf Chart
The Ultimate Guitar Chord Chart. By Dirk Laukens www.guitarchordsmagic.com. This free ebook contains the charts to the most-often used guitar chords. Playing Barre Ukulele Chords. What is a “barre” chord? A barre (or bar(r)) chord, is a chord where you use one (or more fingers) to press down (= fret, bar) multiple strings on the ukulele fretboard. This is most of the time done with the index finger, but there are situations where you’d have to use other fingers.
Basic Guitar Barre Chord Shapes
Before we learn how to physically play barre chords, we ought to firstunderstand how they're built so we can put them into thecontext of our own music. We can identify several barre chord shapesas follows..
E Shape
Time and time again, I hearpeople refer to the E shape/form barre chord as the dreaded 'Fchord'. It's seen as a key milestone after learning your first chords and will likely have a huge impacton your chord/rhythm playing.
So, what makes it the 'E shape'? The sequence below starts off withthe E major open position chord, withwhich I'msure you're familiar. With it's related barre chord, this E major shape(the finger formation on the fretboard) simply gets moved upto the 1st fret (andbeyond), meaningwe have to barre ourindex finger to represent where the nut (or capo)would be in relation to the fretted strings.
Don't try and play anything right now - just observe..
So the barre covers the lowE, Band high estrings, whereas the A,D and G strings representthat familiar open E major formation.
That shape can be positioned anywhere up the fretboard dependingon the chord you want to play (1st fret = Fmaj, 2nd fret = F♯maj, 3rd fret= Gmaj etc.).
Now take a look at a similar diagram below..
The lowest rootnote of the E form barre chord (the fretted red square)is always on the 6thstring, so if (forexample)that root note was positioned at the 5th fret, it wouldbe an A major chord, since the root note wouldbe A.If it was at the 1st fret, it would be Fmajor.
There are higher root notes in the shape, positioned on the 4th and 1st strings, butat this stage it's easiest to identify the root of barre chordsbylooking at theirlowestroot note (the bass note if you like), as the rest of theshape is built from that point.
There is also a minorE shape based on the openE minor shape we're already familiar with. All we do is liftoff our 2nd finger from the major shape to get a minor chord.
A Shape
Exactly the same principle as above, but this time the barre chord isbased on the open A major/minor shapes.
So this time, the bass root is on the A string.It's the A string rootthat determines the note we use in naming the chord.
Note:As shown in the photo below, for the major A shape, it's easiest to barre the2nd, 3rd and 4th strings using your3rd/ring fingerand leave out the 1st string.
Again, we have a minor A shape based on open A minor. This time we usethe index finger barre as usual..
C Shape (not as important)
Not as commonly used, and more difficult to finger, but still good toknow.
You can probably guesswhere C shape barre chords come from. That'sright.. the open C major chord we learn as beginners.
This shape provides us with a slightly different voicing to the Ashape, even though it's rooted on the same (5th) string. Unlike the Ashapewhich ascendsfrom the rootposition, the C shape descendsfrom the root.
Because of the formation of our fingers in this shape, there is noconvenient minorC shape to learn.
Other Shapes (least important)
Some guitar teachers/players make reference to two further barre chordshapes - Dand G. I personally wouldn't spend much time on these.
The full G shapeis a mammoth chord to finger in a barre position(maybe even impossible for players with small hands), and most oftenends up being cut down to the following variation of the A shape(notice the familiar in-line formation of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings). Inthis shape the root is positioned on the 3rd string.
As for the D shape,it's not strictly a barre chord, since there areonly four strings in the shape, and therefore one finger per string andno barre required.
However, it might be useful to barre your index with the D shape (asshown in the diagram) if youwant to use techniques such as hammer ons and pull offs in the chordshape and 'catch' the string with your barre finger. More on that inanother lesson!
And the minor shape..
Once you're confident with how these shapes are formed onthe fretboard, it's time to get physicallyconfident with fingering them and changingbetween them and other chords.
Bookmark and reference this page as yougo through the next lesson on buildingfinger strength with barre chords.