Lesson three introduces a range of informative technical exercises for you to practice that will help you make fast progress playing barre chords across the neck.
In this lesson you will learn about the shapes you will use with finger barre technique to enable you to play any of the chords in any key. What is important to understand here is that although Gary will, through necessity only go through a few chord shapes, what he talks about applies to all chords.
UNDERSTANDING THE UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE
The biggest help you can give yourself when learning the guitar is to not be to centered on specific information. What this means is that as mentioned above, Gary talks about specific chord shapes and their roots. What you need to do is once you have mastered what Gary has demonstrated, go and work on other shapes. With the information given in the last lesson which was an introduction to barre chords and this lesson, you can really open up your chordal knowledge.
This principle of chord shapes and their respective root means you can take any shape, open, barred or indeed anything else and move it up and down the neck. The chord form will be renamed in accordance with the chromatic scale.
TAKE TIME TO CREATE A GREAT SOUND
The final thing to say is that one of the hard things to do when trying to play chords with a barre is get a good clean sound. What usually happens is that a person who can’t ring all the strings presses even harder with their barring finger. Don’t do this. All you’ll do is create more pressure on the strings already being sounded. You won’t effect any of the notes not being played cleanly. The human hand is a marvelous thing.
Slowly ring each of the strings and determine the strings that are not being activated properly. Once you know which fingers are the problem, see if you can apply gentle pressure with the part of your barring finger onto these strings.
