Barre Chords With Ghost Notes

Description

Grab your E-major shaped C major barre-chord, with the barre in the 8th fret. Notice that the thing that makes this difficult is that our 1st finger has to barre across all six strings in order to get the B- and E-string to ring nicely up on top.

The thing is that these two notes, G and C are already being played on the A- and D-string. So these are effectively “doubles” that we've added only to flesh out the chord and make it sound bigger and fuller.

So now the trick is that you can release pressure, and make sure your 1st finger is pressing down the root note on the low E-string and then simply muting the two high strings. Now you have a 4 note voicing that can do almost everything you can do with the full barre-chord, only it sounds a little less full and rich.

This is a great way to make the barre-chords a lot easier to use, so that you can still make music and explore all the uses of them while you simultaneously work on the full versions with discipline and persistence.