Same chord different position

You're looking at wanting to be able to play barre chords, so you can play the same chord in 5 different shapes up the neck. Check out the lessons on this site, and also check out the CAGED system for chords (using the C, A, G, E and D shapes).

But - it's far too early for you to be thinking about playing barre chords yet. You need to build up strength in your fretting hand before you start.

A :-)

Yeah, i've been playing for three years and still haven't mastered those barre chords yet.

My advice, learn what you want at your own pace, makes learning all the more enjoyable IMO. As long as your practicing regular like, you should be able to start on the barre chords within a few months.

But - it's far too early for you to be thinking about playing barre chords yet. You need to build up strength in your fretting hand before you start.

Isn't there a valid case for learning barre chords from the very start? By learning two chord shapes, with variations on each, you can play all over the fretboard which'll help you learn the fretboard quicker. Not to mention that playing barre chords will really help to build up the strength in your fretting hand.

:D :D :D

Vic

Vic, im with you on this one. when i started i didnt realise "barre chords" where a group of chords which were considered harder to play. All i knew is i wanted to learn a song that had F in it, so i learned the F chord. that was in my first week of learning to play (okay, it took me 3 weeks before i could play an F properly).

On reflection im glad i did that, as it really helped me further down the line, and i think learning the barre chord really helped build finger strength - but it was very painful. i had no dexterity at the time and only had a wide necked spanish classical acoustic with really high action.

I'm with Alan on this one. I think most beginners would give up if they had to learn barre chords from the start. IMO, the advantages of seeing how the moveable barre shapes all fit together and relate to each other along the neck would be far outweighed by the sheer difficulty of them for untrained fingers that still have trouble trying to reach simple nut position chords like G, B7, Bb, etc.

I've only been playing for about a month now, and i know this is probably way down the line from where im at. But i notice in most websites show that there are multiple ways to strum the same chord. I only know a few chords like C,G,A,Em,..ect, but i was wondering when should i start to learn about finding different ways of finding the same chord. Or even when should i worrying about what key im in and all that fun stuff. All this is making my head hurt. Thanks in advance!

Yes, there are many ways of playing a chord, but it'll probably be a very long time before you'll have a need to learn a variation on any of those chords you mentioned.

The two barre chords that you really should learn in the beginning are Fmaj and Bmaj. Bmaj is used far less, but it's a good shape to know. A lot of songs use Fmaj.

You don't have to worry about keys now. Chances are unless you'll be playing in a band any time soon, you won't have to transpose to another key or even know what key you are in. That will all come in time as "Ah ha!" moments.

That's my 2 cents.

As for chords played all over the neck, there is another method. And to be honest i'm suprised no one has mentioned it. POWER CHORDS! For punk, and most types of rock, they simply rock! Throw some overdrive on those babys and they couldnt sound sweeter!

They even work nicely on acoustic and clean electric. I use R 5 8a, not just R 5.

You will find that using different versions of the same chord will add interest to your music. Also, sometimes it's just easier to use one version versus another depending what chord you're playing before and/or after.

-- Rob

They even work nicely on acoustic and clean electric. I use R 5 8a, not just R 5.

Yeah i use the same most of the time. But to be honest, i only use them on acoustic in driven, rocky songs or when i cannot play the chord open.

Oh yeah, they're not for nice quiet namby pamby type playing. I like them, for instance, in the passage in Come Together:

G5
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.
B5 A5 G5 A5 (n.c.)
Come together right now………… over me.


Yeah, they are the first thing i learned on guitar. I learned origionally to play rhythm in a punk band.

One of the first chords I teach a new student is F (G and C are very easy, and so many songs use C-F-G that it just makes sense). But I start out with just triads.

So I'll teach the triad:

- F -
- C -
- A -
- x -
- x -
- x -

And they're off and running learning bar chords from nearly day 1.

I've never had a student find it so difficult that they couldn't do it. And having started out learning that way means that adding strings one at a time doesn't seem like such a big challenge.

I think one of the real problems with such voicings is that beginning players leave them till they have a large repertoire of open chords, and they start to carry a mystique about how "hard" they are.

There are other variations of chords up the neck that aren't power chords or barre chords. You can play 3 and 4 string closed form (no open strings) chords up the neck. The simplest example is maybe taking the C7 shape (x32310) and moving it up the neck. At the 3rd fret that is a D7 chord (x5453x). There are lots more of these sorts of chords and they give a "cleaner" sparser sound that work really well in many situations.

The difficulty for a beginner with these is going to be strumming them and avoiding the non-played strings or muting them with one of the fingers holding down the chord. Still, probably easier than starting barre chords for a beginner and it will give them another practical use for knowing the notes on the fingerboard.