Now you have had a good look at the barre chords and are happy moving them up and down the neck (I hope!) we are going to look at the slightly more difficult task of getting to them from open chords. Everyone finds this difficult, but I have a few tips here to help you out!

Practice

Now we are back to the proper "fast as you can for one minute" style for this! They are all hard! This is going to take you some serious practice - but it will come quicker than you think if you just get stuck in, don't worry about it and let your fingers get cool with changing the shapes.

To start with you will normally put the barre down first and then the shape in front. I have seen many beginners who find it easier to put the shape down and then the barre, but most of the time the struggle to get a good barre down and change to barre first eventually.

Of course you should be aiming to for the barre chord shape in the air as you change so you place it down right away (and the first finger kinda rolls a little as it goes down!).

The recommended changes are:

1. A (open) to G Major (barre)
2. D (open) to F#min (barre)
3. C (open) to Ab Major (barre)
4. G (open) to Gb Major (barre)
5. E (open) to F# minor (barre)

It's gonna be tough, but you can do it - I know you can! :) It's just practice! I promise :)))

Once you feel good with that it's time to check out a new approach to playing the Major Scale!

HELP!!!!

If you need to ask a question about this lesson - there is a topic set up specifically to help you with this lesson. To help you find it easily you can click the following link and it will take you right the topic. You'll be able to see questions that other people had and ask your own questions! Hopefully one of the very helpful members of our community will be there to help you soon, I do go there and answer stuff too - but there are just too many questions for me to answer alone! So click this link to get help with this lesson!

Justin's Intermediate Guitar Method - Foundation Stages 1-5 DVD

The 5 x DVD set for the Intermediate Foundation series comes with all the free lessons you are using now PLUS 3 DVD ONLY lessons for each stage, nearly 2.5 hours of extra material for you to be as good as you can be, as fast as possible. Check out the main Intermediate Foundation page for the list of bonus lessons on each stage! Sales of the DVDs allow me to keep the majority of the content free, so I hope will support the growth of this site too, for those that can't afford to buy stuff! :) Click here or the image to your left!