We use cookies to personalise content, serve ads, and analyse traffic.
Lesson time: (3min 8sec)
James Barratt walks through Group C of the Grade 3 technical exercises - the barre-chord shapes and quick changes you'll need to nail in the exam.
This lesson is part of the course Rockschool Guitar Grade 3
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
So, we're going to move on now to Group C. This is the first of all the barre chords exercise. We have to play this in the same rhythm that's written in the book.
These are some quite quick changes, really. You really need to know these chord shapes and be able to put them together quickly enough.
I'm going to play it as you need to play it in the exam now.
Count: 1, 2, 3, 4.
If you're new to barre chords, it can be quite tricky to fret these initially because you're asking a lot of your barring finger, your first finger.
Something that's really worth practicing, without even adding any of the other fingers, is:
Then you can start adding one finger at a time. Things inevitably want to move around, and you might have to fight it a little bit.
Another tip I can give you is, rather than being dead flat across the strings, look at my nail facing onto the strings.
What you can do is:
What this means is that the grooves in your fingers won't fall on the strings. It'll actually be the side of your finger that bars the chord. This can be really useful.
If I exaggerate, that's way too much, but you want to aim for playing a little bit on the side of your finger, about like that, rather than flat.
You might find that especially on some of the minor chord shapes, the groove in your finger lands on the G string. This is really annoying, and it will be muted.
Let's move on to the dominant seventh chords now for part two.
We're going to begin with strumming the chord, and then in your own time, we'll pick the individual strings of the chord.
Here's the sequence:
These are all dominant seventh chords, and lastly:
