As I've been re-evaluating my wrist & elbow technique, I've noticed something about my barre chords, specifically the A chord shape barre chord. I've always had a difficult time making this particular chord sound right, and I've posted a video about the proper placement of the thumb, wrist and arm. I know this is a bit of a basic question, but I thought I'd see what others thought about it as it's bothering me now that I've noticed it.

I would say moving your elbow outward just to play any chord seems to me to be a bad habit. Get your thumb more up and down on the back of the neck instead of angled or sideways. Your thumb looks really stiff and like you are pushing into the back of the neck really hard. It's more of a clamping type feeling between both the fingers and the thumb. Even distribution of the pressure between the thumb and fingers.

I would practice playing the chord, take your hand off the guitar completely, play the chord, hand off guitar completely, repeat daily...slowly and correctly... for 10 minutes straight and after a few months it should be looking better.

I just realised how much I still suck at complete barres chords...Its like In order to do them I have to stop whatever I was doing in order to cleanly execute the damn things and that ussually breaks the flow of whatever I had been doing...I can function okay if its partiall bars chords...where little to no actuall "barring" is taking place ie

But I always wished I could figure out a reliable way to include the 5th on the upper E string
for the "A" chord form like in the C Major chord below


E|-----------------------------------------0------------(3)---|
A|---7>-the 8ve-------------------------2-------3----5----|
D|---7>--and-3rd-both with-pinky----2-------1----5----|
G|---7-------------------------------------2-------3----5----|
B|---5-------------------------------------0-------2----3----|
E|-------------------------------------------------------"C"--------------|

Also the last few days I have been thinking a lot about past things I have tooted my horn off about on these forums...And I am trying to "grow upp"...These forums are important enough to me that now I am comitted to learning my place in the guitaristic pecking order.

Ursin you mentioned developing a feel for eveness in clampage btw thumb and each of the fretting fingers...do you know any super effective exercises for developing a better awarness for this eveness of pressure? It seems to me that what you are describing is a manner of developing some layer of habit/subconcious awarness for how hard each individual finger should be pressing relative to each other finger that is pressing...I think part of what constrains my playing is a very under developed sense for this kind of control over each finger as multiple are being pressed down.

"Also the last few days I have been thinking a lot about past things I have tooted my horn off about on these forums...And I am trying to "grow upp"...These forums are important enough to me that now I am comitted to learning my place in the guitaristic pecking order."

That's cool Nick. But really, there is no pecking order. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. We're all here to learn from each other, and we're all competing with only ourselves.

have had the same problem. recently cured by holding the guitar body with pressure against my torso while pulling slightly harder with the fretting hand back towards the torso. but then it works on acoustics should see why it dosent on electrics.
Not sure its the best way round the problem but it seems to work

Seems from the position your guitar is your fretboard is a long way from your body.
maybe try adjusting strap to pull the neck in closer??

Quote: NicholasJacquet wrote in post #4

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Ursin you mentioned developing a feel for eveness in clampage btw thumb and each of the fretting fingers...do you know any super effective exercises for developing a better awarness for this eveness of pressure? It seems to me that what you are describing is a manner of developing some layer of habit/subconcious awarness for how hard each individual finger should be pressing relative to each other finger that is pressing...I think part of what constrains my playing is a very under developed sense for this kind of control over each finger as multiple are being pressed down.

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Thanks, PB. Really helpful. It seemed to be all about thumb pressure--I was certainly pinching the &&^% out of the neck and wasting lots of energy hence the chicken elbow. Pretty easy fix, surprisingly.