Ps, Hey Joe is a great tune to practice these. It should take about a month if taught and practiced correctly. That might "work" for basic barre chords, but once you start getting into complicated chords involving a barre, or multiple voices, it's going to let you down.įwiw, I have taught professionally since I was 17, and currently have a 9 year old girl and a ten year old boy (Not to mention every other student I have taught) who play/change these with no problems. So you compensate by rolling your finger to the side. When you curve your finger, look what happens, your middle strings are no longer pushed down. This allows the middle strings to get pushed down. What you want is your index finger to not only be straight, but almost back bent. It's a big reason a lot of rock players who switched over to classical guitar struggle. That's something I refer to as "rock and roll finger". I sincerely caution against your suggestion of rolling the index finger to the side and curving it. Hello, I hate to quote your post (because most stuff I have seen you post on this site I agree with you 100%). This is one of those things where you can actually injur yourself so be sure to keep the lines of communication with your body wide open. Stop when you cramp, hydrate, get a little salt and rest. Building endurance as a player comes slowly. If you can find 2 15 minute sessions a day, that'll be a lot more productive than 3.5 hours on Sunday. Fingerpick a pattern that uses all 6 strings.Īlso, remember that daily practice is far more important than length of practice overall. This way you're keeping the exercise somewhat musical. A good exercise is to do it on 1, 8 and 10th frets in a blues. Add the other fingers after that's together. The biggest practice routine is just trying to get all 6 strings ringing on the same fret. Rock players tend to stick to power chords and in jazz, we mute/omit a few strings so you wind up playing chords with 1 finger per note. Then, you'll find that guys like Nile Rodgers who uses mostly barre chords isn't hitting all strings at the same time and most songwriters avoid them for the comfort of more interesting voicings. There's definitely two schools of thought around this idea, so take that up with your instructor. Also, like I said, my acoustics are still very high tension so you should practice on electric as well as nylon if those options are available, building up to an acoustic when you're ready. Don't go all the way to the side of your finger, but hopefully this helps. That being said, the first thing is to roll your finger back a little on its side and curl it slightly. I'm still far more comfortable thinking about what notes I'm playing on my E and A strings because of all of the years of transposing on the fly using them. To really get proficient, it was about two years, though the cramping from squeezing too much with my thumb remains. Thinking back, it was necessity of not being much of a singer and expanding on the power chords where I did spend so much time with them that I could sight-read changes using them. But, it's a definite tool when doing modern RnB for example. As I learned jazz, I learned ways to voice that don't require barre chords, so part of it is that I'm dis-incentivized from putting a ton of time into them. I still cramp up when doing long sessions on an acoustic where I'm using them. As Joe mentioned, don't squeeze with your thumb too much. OR, Ten has the brilliant idea to start a friends with benefits relationship with Kun.I've been at this for 20 years now (odd realization, trust me) and I am still not really comfortable with barre chords.
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