3 ways to make the F Major chord easier!

There is no doubt about the fact that one of the biggest road blocks to your guitar progression in the early days is the dreaded F major barre chord. In fact, it's such a big block for many that this is where the journey ends! There are millions of people across the world who have simply given up at this point claiming that it is a mountain that cannot be climbed or conquered.

The purpose of this blog is to give you three other options whilst the F barre chord mountain is still being climbed. There is no reason that you need to avoid songs that use the F major whilst you are still mastering the chord. In fact, using the simpler versions can help build up the strength you need to get the barre chord. So in this lesson I'll take you through the 3 other ways you can play this chord to still get a lot of enjoyment out of it even before you master the barre.

The video

So, before you dive into the reading, here is the original video I put together for this subject! Enjoy my younger self teaching you how to play these different shapes, so that you have a clear visual and audio guide to work with. There is also a song to help you practice, which you can download here.

Do we need the barre?

An important part of this lesson is understanding that you don't need to play the F major as a barre chord. The barre chord contains 6 notes, but the F major chord only needs 3. Theory wise, any major chord only needs a root, 3rd and 5th from the major scale. This means that in a barre chord you have a lot of repeating notes. In fact, in that F Major classic barre chord shape you have 3 root notes, 2 fifths and 1 major third. We certainly don't need all of that.

So, let's take a look at the three new ways to play this chord, that are not the full barre chord shape:

The cool thing about breaking the chord up like this is that it gives you a lot of options! As you may well know be now, there is never just "one way to do it"… There are always options and we have to do what fits our hands, and our style. So experimenting with all 3 of these is going to help massively! In order to help you with the experimentation, we have a cool song for you to learn, so let's get down to that next.

The song

This little track I've put together has plenty of opportunities to play that F major chord! I've written a very specific part, which I'll show you below, but you can equally just take the shape you feel most comfortable with and strum along to the track with that. You can do the whole thing in open chords if you fancy. Here are those chords:

I would highly recommend trying to play the song with the specific chords I work through in the video, and as I say in the video, if any are too hard at this point, use this track to gradually work with them. The point here is that you open yourself up to a variety of F major alternatives, so that you don't feel as though the dreaded F major barre is the end of your guitar journey! Instead, you are able to play a simpler version as you gradually work to improve the barre. Here is the tab:

Conclusion

So there we have it, a beautiful range of options to play the F major chord. The choice is now yours! Have some fun playing around with this one, and let us know how you get on via our community channel if you're a Club member! PS. Don't forget to sign up and start your Guitar club trial period here if you haven't already!