Trouble with your F & B Chords???

hey guitar players it's Sean and welcome to today's guitar beginners guide video uh this video is kind of a follow-up to one I did a little while back which was called five chords you must know and in that video I covered uh the major chords which were a c d e and G but notably I left B and F out of the picture and why did I do that because I wanted to dedicate a video just to those chords because they do present certain challenges for the beginner guitar player now the being the F chord we'll be covering today are slightly simplified versions sometimes people refer to them as like beginner versions of the chords themselves uh however they do have their things about them so the way that today's video is going to work is first I'm going to show you how to play each chord uh just in case you don't know them already and uh then I'm going to backtrack and we'll look at some of the challenges that each chord presents and some solutions to make them sound great all right so here's our F chord now the F chord does something a bit different than all the others so far and what that is is it's pushing down two strings at the same time so my first finger is pushing down at the first fret uh the first and the second string together like this and we call that a bar b a r r e and on the cord grid you'll see here a little swoopy line and that's indicating to do a bar like that so I leave that there and now I take my second finger I place it on the third string at the second fret and my third finger goes on the fourth string at the third fret now when I strum the F chord I don't play the fifth or the sixth string just those four and that's what it sounds like all right up next is our B so what's going on with the B chord is I am putting my first finger on the first string at the second fret I'm putting my second finger on the fourth string at the fourth fret my third finger goes in the third string at the fourth fret and my pinky goes on the second string at the fourth fret and I don't play my sixth or my fifth [Music] string all right so you got all that no problem at all the f is nice and clear and the B is is a piece of cake see you next time probably not right let's break these down and uh hopefully I can help you on your road making these nice and clear and easy to play all right so as far as f is concerned the main challenge or the most obvious one is this baring business right here where is if you haven't had to do this kind of thing before it can be really difficult to make this sound clear and crisp and all that kind of stuff and then also when like later when I place these other fingers on what tends to happen is the first finger will want to lift a little bit and then I'll get angry and I'll try to force that down and these fingers will go this way and it's all downhill from there so let's talk Solutions here let's make this work what I would do first if I were you if you've never had to do this kind of barring business before in other words pushing down more than one string at the same time with a single finger I would focus on that for starters now we're here at the first fret and one thing that's different about this fret is it's compared to the others is that it's very close to the nut of the guitar now the closer you get to the nut with your finger the harder it is to push down those strings and you can kind of even try that on your own as you get close to there yeah it's like very very high tension so you want to place your finger as close to the Fret wire as you can so like kind of like that kind of thing now myself when I play f i angle my finger slightly like this this may or may not work for you it works great for me um you may prefer to have your finger a little a little bit more straight but that's something you can kind of play around with and also I recommend doing something like this moving your bar around a little bit just to kind of get used to the sensation or the feeling of barring on the guitar it's a reality that's going and this is going to be used more and more as you get into more complicated chords um so this is a great great way to get used to it also um when you do move it around don't keep the pressure down and then just try to force it you'll kind of hurt your finger especially if you don't have calluses on your fingers yet um but just kind of lift it and move it and also I would recommend maybe trying different combinations of strings you could do like I don't know bar in your second and your third string right your third and your fourth string you know and so on and so on and that will help you get used to this sensation now when you place the rest of the cord on what happens not all the time but but quite often is is you know your bar is sounding really good you put these guys on and then what happens is this first finger kind of lifts a little bit because you're kind of stretching the hand out and again this is this is quite common and then you end up with something that sounds you know sounds good till you get to the bar part and you're like oh man I put in all this work on this so here's here's what I recommend you do is first of all try to relax a little bit don't overdo it with pushing and struggling and trying to make this thing sound good it'll get there don't worry about it but place your fingers where they're supposed to go and then just kind of relax and actually right now these are all I'm not even pushing down I just have my fingers in place this is a great thing to try so just putting them there keeping them in place and if you find that it's all kind of mushing up on you you know depending on flexibility of your hand and so on you can just take your other hand and just kind of maybe gently guide those guys back okay and then try applying some pressure okay like as if you you're going to play it kind of thing and then just kind of release and just have it have them sitting there and just getting used to this sensation of having these guys spread out also um when at first a lot of people do this chord they do the bar then they add this finger and then they add this one right um try going in the opposite order just for fun go like third finger on the fourth string there and then your second finger and then adding the bar that might give you a totally different perspective on the whole thing okay but just relax you'll get it eventually don't worry now if you've been enjoying this content I would really appreciate it if you would like and subscribe and uh leave some comments and thank you in advance so let's talk about the B chord all right so let's talk about some of the challenges with the B chord some of the weirdness um the the thing about this chord is that there's a bit of a stretch going on here and what I mean by that is my first finger is way over here at the second fret and the first string and then these three are at the they're on the fourth fret uh on different strings and you've got a gap you got a fret in between them and what often happens is this finger will want to kind of join the others and I end up with something that sounds like that which is very interesting but it wasn't what we were going for going for more of that kind of thing and and it's you know it's like I said it's because of this this Gap this stretching and I would say that the most difficult part of it is the relationship between the first and the second finger so I just kind of took the others away there so what's going on of course is first finger is on the first string at the second fret and my second finger is on the fourth string at the fourth fret and this can be a bit of a do at first um so just try practicing like isolating those two fingers and maybe take this approach too like we did with the last chord place this guy first and then try placing your second finger and the opposite another thing that I find works really really well is just a little bit of imagery here just imagine that these three fingers your your second third and fourth finger that you accidentally crazy glued them together uh which I've done before I don't recommend it um it's no fun and just but just imagine that they're stuck together and they're like a unit okay and they're just forming this shape and if you did the other video if you already know an a chord by the way that looks just like an a chord just with instead of these three fingers it's with these three so that might help out a little bit and just imagine like I said that they're a unit and they're not kind of spread out like this but they're they're they're together okay so instead of one at a time three at a time and then placing your finger and again just relax you can do the cord and again with no pressure on and then push putting it on and working at it like that okay so that's a lot of talk about what's going on with placing the fingers but there's one really really key thing that we haven't talked about yet and that is what's going on with the thumb because what you're doing with your thumb can make or break your cords all right so here's an overhead view um of what I'm doing with my thumb now when I play I've got my thumb kind of in the middle-ish area here of of the chord and what that does is that allows my hand my fingers to nicely spread out um if you're doing things like this and again we're all different right but but if you're doing this generally speaking you're kind of cramping up and misshaping your your hand um and also if you're really gripping the neck hard like like so and you've got like no space here you're kind of doing what we call cup the neck um that will restrict the movement of your fingers as well make it making it you know more difficult than it needs to be so I recommend something that looks sort of like that and we're all different you know all our hands are different shapes and sizes but something approximately like that and that goes for the B chord as well right so if you're like this it makes it difficult you know your fingers kind of drape over or if it's too far this way then the your hand the fingers want to kind of go like this way okay so sort of like like that now one last point I want to make is sometimes it's not you it's the guitar um so if your guitar hasn't been what's known as set up before or it hasn't been for a long time um I would suggest you have that done because sometimes our strings we don't notice but they get higher on on us that's called the action so the action gets a bit higher um maybe the neck is kind of warped you know due to changes in weather or humidity um making it more difficult to play than is necessary or you've got like thousand-year-old strings on it that are kind of gross and Rusty and cut your fingers every time you go to play the guitar so I would recommend always having the guitar set up and uh in good working order all right so there you go I hope that helps we'll see you next time I'm Sean

Channel: Shawn Trotter

Views: 6,291

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Id: M2PcBiYHTOY

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024