Intermediate Guitar Lesson 2

Discover the secret to successful practice!

Glad to see you are back, in this intermediate guitar lesson we are going to get down to the nitty-gritty and look at how to learn all barred chord shapes properly.

Musicians who go through a phase of serious practice in their life always come to the same conclusion: it’s all about getting as much out of a concept as you possibly can.

For a drummer this could for example mean moving the accent of a 16th to all possible position in a bar.

That might have seemed like an awful amount of work, but there’s more! What about doing the same in a bunch of different key signatures like 5/8 and 7/8?

What started out as a simple concept of moving the accent ended up becoming a universe of accent displacement.

What the drummer achieved from this sort of adventure is better control.

As a guitarist it would be a great exercise to do the same on just one note, or why not adapt this concept to chromatic exercise 2!

Let’s adapt this way of learning to: How to learn all our barred chord shapes.

Practicing the different chord shapes.

So what does moving an accent on drums have to do with practicing guitar?

Let’s take a look at the E shape and find out!

So this is an A chord in an E shape, you memorize this and think, brilliant, I know that, what’s next?

Well, next up is to divide this E shape into small sections.

This actually makes complete sense since on guitar (especially electric) it is actually more common that you play a section of a chord shape, rather than the full chord shape.

So let’s do that, let’s divide the E shape into three different sections and run those through the cycle of 4ths, to a click!

Not only will this manifest the chord shape much better, it will also teach you all the notes on the fretboard better since you are looking for different root notes, not just the one on string 6!

Intermediate guitar lesson 2 home work

Play each exercise as the TAB show below

E shape, top three strings

E shape, middle three strings

E shape low three strings

The last 4 shapes

Now that you’ve seen the full concept written out, below are the remaining 4 shapes displayed, but only from chord A to C, ensure you take this around the entire cycle of 4ths!

A shape in two sections

D shape in two sections

G shape in two sections

C shape in two sections.

Practice barred chord shapes

In order for you to complete this you need to keep track of your practice routine, write down how many of these exercises you did, at what BPM and any additional comments.

Tomorrow is a new day and you need to pick up where you left off, not start all over again or stray off into same other topic.

Remember; to have a successful practice session you need to get as much out of a specific concept as you possibly can.

Next up is Intermediate Guitar Lesson 3.

Happy playing!

-Dan (your guitar guru)