Last week I was talking about grand barré and the difficulties that it causes in F-major. Let’s go on with exploring the possibilities of the barré – this time it is a medium barré (also called ‘half barré’). If full barré needs a fully extended straight finger to cover all the strings, then half barré means that only half of the strings are pressed down with the first finger. In this type of barré, you have to let your middle joint to bend a bit. The rest is very similar to the other types of barrés – you press down the strings with the outer side of your finger:

Make sure that your finger is as close to the fret as it gets without damping the sound. On the picture it always seems like my finger is actually on the fret. It is not.

The chord A6 is made of 4 different notes: A-C#-E (an A-major triad) + F# (sixth note from the base). This type of chords are used in bossa nova, jazz, swing and folk music. Not much in pop and rock music.

Theory is a great thing but practicing is eventually all that you need: Play our interactive, sound recognition based guitar chord game at strumProfessor.com