Wait! What's Barring?

Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here): 

THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!

It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.

DON’T BE LIKE THEM! 

Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks. 

Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.

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Okay, but what is barring? 

You can take any chord and bar it with your index finger. Yes, it might take some fingering changes for the chord, but it can be done. Another way to cheat and do this is with a capo. 

Capos and bars basically just change the key that you’re playing in. 

Check this out: Remember the E chords? 

Now look at these F chords. 

See anything familiar?

They’re played the same way, just with the addition of the bar. You can also put a capo on the 1st fret and just play the E chords. Except now, guess what? They’re all F chords! 

Now that’s pretty cool. You can make any chord change to any other chord name with just a bar or a capo. To know what the chord name gets changed to, just look at the lowest note and the shape of the chord it’s based on.

Want a reminder on the geography of your guitar neck? Check out this post on it.

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the bar chord mecca.

The only thing left is the theory of what makes a chord what it is. That’s next.