You cannot play every chord in the guitar’s open position.
What if you wanted to play an F or B chord? How about an F# or Gb chord for that matter? You can’t do it without using a barred chord. There are 12 possible major chords and without barre chords you can only play 5 of them. It’s the same thing with minor chords. A barre chord is where we take a basic chord pattern and “move” it up the neck of the guitar to create different chords.
Chord phrasing is art of taking a chord progression and turning it into a means of personal expression. Chord phrasing allows you total freedom during the performance of a song to do anything you can imagine with the song’s chord structure. In other words, when playing rhythm guitar you don’t have to just play the chords that go along with the progression. Playing just the chords can, and will get boring rather quickly.Read More »What is chord phrasing?
A trill is performed by quickly hammering on and pulling off two notes. It’s usually represented by a “tr” and a squiggle line like seen… Read More »Trills
Tapping is the technique Eddie Van Halen made famous. It involves hammering on the fretboard with your 1st or 2nd finger of your picking hand to produce a note then pulling off to notes fingered by your fret hand. The involvement of the picking hand in this fashion is called a tap. It is usually represented by a “T” in tablature.Read More »Fretboard Tapping
Sometimes when looking at a piece of music you’ll see some odd chord voicing that have slashes in them. For example a C/G chord, or an A/E. What kind of chords are these and how do you play them?Read More »How do I play chords with slashes?
Difficulty:Easy – Intermediate There’s some interesting things going on in this song as two of the guitars use an alternate tuning. The chords played in this… Read More »“Yellow” by Coldplay
You will need to tune to Drop D.Read More »“Undertow” by Tool
Difficulty: Intermediate Here is a band who has stood the test of time. It seems like they’ve always had their own sound and style. Like… Read More »“Test For Echo” by Rush
In these exercises, you are to figure out the barre chord that needs to be played, and apply them to strumming basic quarter notes.
For the first few pages of exercises I’ve include red lettering that Read More »A Shape Barre Chord Exercises
