I was talking to a friend the other day who picked up guitar in the last year.
He knows that I teach, and so we got to talking about guitars, and how his playing was progressing.
He described to me how he goes about learning new guitar songs: basically he searches Youtube to see if anyone has done a guitar lesson on it.
In most cases, someone has hacked together a bit of a lesson, enough to kind of learn the chords from, anyway.
But the interesting part (to me) was that he said that about 40% of the song lessons he watched, he turned off within 60 seconds.
Why is that?
Because as soon as the teacher listed what chords were involved, red flags would start shooting up.
“Oh shoot – that song has a B minor in it? I don’t know that chord… it’s a bar chord!”
I’m serious – my friend was quite honest in sharing his thoughts with me… and I suspect there are many others out there in a similar situation, too.
The inability to play bar chords kept my friend from playing a large chunk of his favorite songs.
Learning bar chords can truly free you up to learn ANY SONG you please… because once you know just a small handful of chord shapes, you will literally know every common chord in the book.
“The BCMS course is helping me tremendously.
Since I have been following your clear-cut instructions on playing basic fundamentals of bar-chord structure, I have noticed that my playing has been progressively improving over time.
Your presentation of this course, in its efficient and practical format, would benefit anyone interested in climbing out of the routine “open chord syndrome” into a bar-chord world full of infinite variety and complexity.”
Alfred Bates
Louisiana, USA
Funny thing I remember the first guitar book I bought. I didn’t know a thing and I had enough money for one book. The title was “Bar Chords” I didn’t have a clue but I work on it and got real good with bar chords but no other chords. It wasn’t until I got an acoustic and started strumming that I got re-inspired and found a whole new beautiful world, Acoustic and I haven’t looked back!