How to Play a Bar Chord on a Guitar

One of the most fundamental and necessary chords to have in your guitar playing repertoire is the bar chord. It is the key in most every song.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Guitar
• Pick

Bar Chord Basics

1. Know the way of the fretboard. If you already own a guitar, you should know how to hold the instrument, know up from down, high from low.

2. Pick up your guitar. Have your guitar in hand while you read these directions. Visual learning and guitar playing go hand-in-hand.

3. 

   Hold your guitar and lay your pointer finger across the fret on which you would like to start the bar chord; your finger should cover every string -this is the base of your bar chord. Pictured here is an F bar chord.

4. Place two of your remaining three fingers on the fret board. There are many different ways of playing the chord from here but the easiest, most common way is by using either a type one or type two bar chord. To do either of these, take your ring finger and your pinkie finger and place them two frets up the fretboard from your pointer finger on two different strings which are next to each other; these strings need to be one string away from the string at the top of your pointer finger. In a type one power chord this is the low E string.

5. Place your middle finger one fret up from your pointer finger, in-between the three fingers already placed, a string higher than your pinky.

6. 

   Strum. You just played a bar chord. You can now play power chords too. Power chords are bar chords in which you only strum the lowest three strings for a type one and the lowest four for a type two. Pictured in step three is an F bar chord or type one and pictured here is a B flat or a type two bar chord.