A question about Guitar Chord Charts?

Question

I was looking at guitar chord charts, and there are these things called bars??? How to you play those?

Answer 1

These "things" are called bar chords. Your index finger is the bar (it presses down on either all six or five strings, depending on what bar chord diagram you're looking at), while your middle, ring, and pinky form the chord part.

Answer 2

A bar, or perhaps a barre, is effectively a manual capo. Chord fingerings are a pattern based off the "open strings". You have six strings on a guitar, and you only have four fingers to work with (and sometimes they "don't bend that way". If you use your index finger to press down all six strings, then the remaining three to make the chord pattern, you will have effectively put a temporary capo on the instrument.

You will find this impossible to do for all chords as you won't have enough fingers left. When a chord chart indicates a bar it will often show an "x" also for strings not to be plucked.

As to the 7th, it is an addition to a chord, as is a 6th. The standard pattern for the great majority of songs (folk, traditional, etc. - less so the more modern) has three chords. The tonic, the fourth and the fifth. Each of those is a major chord if you are starting with a major tonic (the second, third and sixth are minor, the seventh is diminished).

Ooops, I just made a confusion. Let us assume that we are playing in the key of C major. The C chord is the tonic, the F chord is the fourth, the G chord is the fifth - and you can play lots of things with those. But you will often see the G noted as G7. That means to add the seventh note of the G scale (i.e., F) to the chord. The reason that this often appears is because the F is a "leading tone" into the C chord, it prepares the ear for a C major chord. Try playing the sequence C,F,G, then play C,F,G7. Try them in different orders, you will see that in some cases you want to "lead into" the closure of the C with the G7, and other times you will not. The same applies in the minor keys (A being the relative minor of C, and D the fourth and E the fifth). The confusion I made above was the "seventh chord" being diminished, I meant the chord based on the seventh note of the C scale, the 7 chord is the addition of the seventh of the particular chord you are playing.

Clear as mud?