Hey, how are you doing?
It's Justin here for another little video lesson
In this one today, we are going to be checking out a mini-barre.
Cool, right?
Now this sort of chord type is not that sort of thing
you'd find in many beginner's books,
a lot of people kind of avoid this chord too much later on
but I've had quite a lot of success
teaching this to beginners,
particularly those with, how should we put it, large fingers
Now, if you are heavy of hand,
then you may have found trying to scram all your fingers into that second fret
to play your A chord extremely difficult
and in which case, this is your little life saver going
"Hallelujah, I can play my A chord"
it's that moment for you,
because what we gonna be doing is that we gonna be playing
the whole of our A chord with just one finger
So, let's move over to a little close-up and check out
how exactly we are going to be doing that.
Well, here are are, this is what our A chord looks like now,
a little bit weird, isn't it?
Ok, let me get rid of those fingers
so you can see what's going on here
and you'll see there what I've done is I'm just
hitting all three notes there with my first finger
Now, what's really important to realize when you do this,
this is that we don't want the thinnest string
the thinnest string which used to be
. . .
open string, is now muted
now, if we let our first finger cover all four strings
. . .
we end up with kind of an Elvis chord
. . .
which in that instant is wicked,
but actually, most of the time we don't want that
we want to just have a regular A,
and the secret to holding this little barre down
is exactly the positioning of your finger.
Now, in order to show you that properly,
we are going to have to go to another kind of a stranger angled shot,
so let me move over to that now
try and get your first finger in, like in the second fret,
holding down strings two, three and four
and then you should be ready for this next little weird close-up
where hopefully, the penny will drop and it will make sense.
So here we are with our interesting looking new A barre chord thingy
So, what we are doing here is I'm using my first finger,
the fat of the first section of my first finger
to hold down strings four, three and two
and in order to get a good amount of pressure there,
I'm really forcing that knuckle forward
the knuckle right at the bottom of the screen there,
I'm pushing that forward as far as I can
and that's what helps give me my pressure
on those all three of those strings.
You'll see that if I let the knuckle fall behind,
as I start pulling, trying to get my finger harder on the strings,
it kind of lifts the finger off, it works like a little lever
or a see-saw that's pushing the end of my first finger up
Really what we're after
is trying to get that knuckle right far forward
Now, if I bring the rest of my hand around, the fingers around
to where it would normally be positioned
you can see, you can't even see the A chord really,
and you could certainly can't see that knuckle
which is why a lot of people have trouble with this
because they don't see exactly how it should go
you see, if I just move my fingers out of the way,
look at the angle of that first finger
even if I take it off the string,
you can see it's really at a right angle to the rest of my finger
and then it's just pushing down,
it's almost bending a little bit backwards at that first joint
Now, if you can...
. . .
it is possible even to lift that
knuckle far enough to get an open E string ringing out
but most of the time you don't even want that
. . .
as long as you get the notes, the A, the partial barre,
that thinnest string can just get muted, and that's fine
but the secret to getting your A barre chord like that,
is getting that knuckle really far,
as far forward as you possibly can
Well, I really hope you've enjoyed this little tussle
with this new mini-barre A chord
It's not for everyone, so I'd say in general it works out...
about 40% of my students really like playing A like this,
and the rest of them hate playing it that way for ages
So, don't be worried
if you don't really get on with playing it that way, it's cool.
I'm just showing it to you because it really is useful for
anyone with a bigger sort of finger,
it's a lot easier to play an A chord like that
and it's definitely worth learning
and I wanna say, in my general playing these days,
if I'm gonna play an A chord,
most of the time, it's that one.
I find it hell of a lot easier
than trying to put the three fingers in that same fret,
It's just that it doesn't work for me at all,
so I mostly use the mini-barre
But, you don't feel like you have to use it right now
and I mean, let's face it, who doesn't like a mini bar?
Well, except the prices.
Anyway, have a go with that chord, play about with it a bit,
and we're on to looking at how to change
between all of these new chords now.
So I'll see you for that lesson shortly