Sound Lush on The Guitar!

Use a Barre Chord Shape with some open strings and add extra textures to your guitar playing!

This Barre chord trick will make simple chord progressions sound much more interesting! You can use this simple trick in many different ways, and this lesson will give you loads of insights to try out.

If you can handle an F Barre Chord, remember the hardest part is the actual barre. It's not putting the rest of the fingers down! So, the cool thing about the trick we're about to explore is that it starts with a barre shape but lifts the first finger off all of the notes except the root note.

Before you get started, make sure you know the root notes of the thickest two strings. You'll need that to find chords in your fretboard; just like we did when learning our Power Chords!

The F Chord/E Shape Barre Chord

This lesson will start off using an F chord, which is an E Shape Barre Chord. We call it an E Shape because if we took the barre away and slid it down, it looks like a regular E chord. Check out my Ultimate Guide to Easy Barre Chords to improve your barre chords skills and learn how to slide your E Shape Barre all over your fretboard.

Now, we'll play with our first finger only the thickest string, not the full barre. Watch the video tutorial to learn more about fingering.

When to Lift Your Barre

This trick makes your chord progression sound much richer and more interesting. You shouldn't do it all the time because too much of it would end up sounding boring, but explore some of the chord shapes you already know using this trick and see what you get!

The Lifted Barre Chord is a creative tool, and now it's the perfect time for you to start exploring things like this. Technically, you'll find new chords that sound very lush. If you want to understand the Theory behind them and unleash your musicianship even further, check my Music Theory course!

The Minor Chords

You might encounter a few problems when applying this trick to Minor Chords. You might find that some grips are just too awkward and hard to jump into, especially in live situations. Sometimes, you might even have to remove the root note, and that's completely fine.

💡 Explore some minor grips and you might encounter a chord used in Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones. Watch the video to learn which one!

As a general rule, the chords D, C, B, A, G, F, and F# will give you lush open chords with this trick!

Experiment!

The big takeaway of this lesson is to invite you to experiment! Take a chord progression that you know already and try this trick out. It works great with chord progressions like A, G, C, and A, or G, C, D, and A.

💡 The Blower's Daughter by Damian Rice uses loads of these grips! If you know more songs that use the Lifted Barre Chords trick, let me know in the Discussion section. :)

New to JustinGuitar? Create a free account and get access to My Practice Assistant and much more!