[Guitar Plays]
- What's up, guys? My name is Andrew Clark and today
I'm gonna show you a very cool bar-chord alternative.
So, we all know that bar-chords
are something we have to learn.
And sometimes as beginner or intermediate student
of the guitar, they can be a little bit of a challenge.
They're really hard on your hands and a lot of times
people spend maybe a year, two years, just trying
to develop enough dexterity and
strength to even be able to do one.
And the reason we need bar-chords is honestly
just because we don't have enough fingers on our
hands to play the chords we want to play.
So, if we want to play a G-sharp major bar-chord,
well, we don't have enough fingers to do that properly
without playing a full bar-chord, right?
I'm going to show you a way where
you do not have to bar at all.
Now, okay I lied, a tiny little
bar, but it's much easier to do.
So, what we're going to do is, instead of using
this entire finger to bar everything,
we are going to be using our thumb.
So, immediately this becomes something that's
a little bit scary, it's a little bit different.
And if you've learned in the past to keep your
thumb behind the neck of the guitar, this is going
to feel really unnatural and that's totally okay.
So, how we're going to start, you see people like
John Mayer, Joe Bonamassa, people like that use their
thumb all the time, so it's totally okay, I promise.
But what we're gonna do is we're gonna take
our hand like this and we're gonna almost
pretend we're grabbing a baseball bat, if you
can kind of imagine that in your head.
So, we take our hand, boom, like this.
We're not grabbing properly, like this,
we're grabbing like this.
And you can see my thumb comes
overtop and my fingers go like this.
Now, I have very long, slender fingers.
I tested this to make sure with someone with
smaller fingers that they can absolutely make these reaches.
It's just gonna take a little bit of time to
get all the angles down correctly.
So, what we're gonna do, we're gonna bring our hand in
and basically, the crease of these fingers here is
going to be right at the bottom of our fretboard
Maybe adjusted a little bit, but otherwise we're just
wrapping overtop with our thumb like this. Very simple.
We're not making a chord right now. That's totally okay.
We're just doing this to get the position right.
And then what we're gonna do is,
we're gonna use this first finger to, in this case
we're gonna do a G-sharp major because this might be
something you'd actually use as a bar-chord.
We are gonna use this finger to bar
strings one and two at fret four.
We're gonna bring this finger down right there,
on the third string on fret five.
Then, this is a little bit of a departure from what you
might be used to doing, we're gonna use these two fingers
on the sixth fret on the A and D strings, the fourth
and fifth string here, and then we take our thumb
and we're gonna put it overtop.
Now, this is gonna feel a little bit weird
at first and that is totally okay.
Bring the thumb over, and you really don't have to
apply a lot of pressure if your guitar's set up properly.
Even in an acoustic guitar, it's not too bad.
You might be kind of using the side
of your thumb, you might be using the top.
Don't go crazy with any weird angles.
Just very natural and nice and relaxed.
And if you were to look at this now, we are playing
that bar like this while we play that E major
shape that we would normally play for a bar
chord, except the only bar we're doing
is this little two-string one.
And the cool thing about the little two-string one here
is that it's much easier to make that pressure
on those two strings, so even if you're not used
to barring or you're not used to doing anything like that
and you don't have the strength for it yet,
this is a much more natural way to bar something.
So, it should be pretty easy for you.
So, you want to double-check that
everything's pushed down properly.
This one might be the tough one on the low E string.
If we strum [Strums Guitar]
So, the first tip that I have for you for making this
sort of bar-chord alternative with the thumb over
the top is to sit up straight.
Now, when you sit up straight, what that does
is it puts the guitar in a much better
position for your thumb to reach over.
When you're playing regular bar chords, you probably
are bringing your neck up higher to get your thumb behind
to have enough strength to not be awkward when you're
trying to play that bar chord, right?
So, in this case, we're gonna do the opposite because,
if we bring our thumb over, and it's nice and high up,
it's actually more awkward on our wrist, so we want
the guitar to be a little bit lower, in a
more natural position, like this. It's very horizontal.
So, like this, sitting up. The straighter I sit, the
easier this is probably going to be now.
That rolls right into tip number two,
which is just to relax everything.
So, you want to bring your elbow into your body, but
it is relaxed. It's basically just the
weight of my arm and my shoulder.
I'm not pulling it in tight. All I'm doing is I'm
just sitting there with my elbow totally relaxed.
The same thing goes all the way up to my wrist.
My wrist is not tensed at all.
It's like I said. I'm grabbing a baseball bat
or something like that and I'm not holding up any weight.
The guitar neck should be sitting naturally like that.
You come in, nice and relaxed, elbows in.
This is nice straight line.
Maybe play around a little bit with the exact angle,
but the biggest is just to relax and not create any
weird angles or kink your wrist or kink your elbow
or do anything weird like that.
So, then for the very last tip, you're gonna be using the
side of your thumb instead of the fleshy part of your thumb.
Now, when you're doing this, it's totally gonna
depend on your own body and the way that your hand
is shaped when you grab the neck and
you're reaching over the fret board.
For me, and what's easiest for me is actually to use,
you can see I'm using the side of my thumb.
There's kind of a boney part right here, and it sits
right perfectly on the string like that.
And you can hear [Guitar Strums]
It's almost easier to keep it clean.
When I get to the fleshy part, it becomes a little
bit of a challenge to make sure I'm pushing down
hard enough, to make sure that I'm accurate enough,
not kind of bumping over the fret.
This is a much smaller point of contact, so when you're
putting that thumb down, try using the side.
Like I said, it's much easier to squeeze and you
can get more strength because you really don't
feel like you're pushing that hard because your
hand's in such a natural position.
One other thing I wanted to make sure that I mentioned
is that this totally works for minor chords as well.
Now, this isn't really going to work for
A-String root note bar-chords, really.
This is more of an E string root note bar-chord thing.
So, your regular E major, E minor shapes, but if we want to
do G-sharp major [Guitar Strums]
But if we want to do a minor chord, all we have to do is,
when we remove this finger, we have an open string.
So, we just wanna creep our pointer finger, finger
number one up, so it bars the top three
strings instead of the top two.
Now, naturally, when I do my major shape, I just bar that
naturally anyway, so it's just in that position.
But, if you're only barring those top two,
just sneak that up a little bit. [Guitar Strums]
Just like that.
So, I hope you found this helpful.
Whether you use it as a way to take a break from
playing bar chords in longer songs or you decide you
want to use this as your primary six string root note bar
chord, that is totally okay. I hope you enjoyed it.
Make sure, if your thumb's not too sore, you give
this video a "thumbs up" and make sure you subscribe to
the channel too.
I will see you guys next time.
[Guitar Music Plays]