Barre chords (A and E shape)

Hi There,

Thanks for reading my blogs so far.

In previous blogs I’ve mentioned how chords and scales link together and also a bit on the CAGED chord system.

Now we’ll look at how to write a song just playing barre chords to get you used to moving around the neck in different shapes.

We’ll just be concentrating on A and E shape Major and Minor chords.

So A and E shape Major chords would look like this in open and barre form:

Here i’ve displayed moving the open A major chord up to a B major Barre shape and an open E major chord to a G major barre shape.

Here’s what the Am and Em open shapes look like when moved up the neck:

Here i’ve displayed moving the open A minor chord up to a B minor Barre shape and an open E minor chord to a G minor barre shape.

Again there are 12 keys in music so you can play any of these barre shapes in 12 different keys.

Now using your major scale TTSTTTS rule we can write a song and play it just using barre shapes

Let’s do a song in A major

Using your TTSTTTS rule the notes would be A,B,C#,D,E,F# and G#

Using your harmonising rule (major,minor,minor,major,major,minor, diminished)

the chords would be A, Bm, C#m, D, E , F#m and G#dim

From those chords let’s take A, C#m, F#m D and E using the A and E shapes.

This is what it could look like:

If you play these together say 2 bars on each chord with one of my strumming patterns in previous blogs you’ll find they’ll sound nice togther.

Plus it’s really good practice to switch between various barre chord shapes with root notes on different strings.

Hope you’ve found this blog useful

You can find other useful tips @jsmusicschool on twitter.

Many thanks for reading

ROCK N ROLL

James Schofield