In Praise of B Minor
The relationship that guitarists have with barre chords and my first steps in to songwriting
When you first learn to play the guitar, you usually start with basic open chords.
You only need two or three of the easier to play ones and you can perform a whole host of songs.
It’s easy to look back after several years of playing the guitar and forget what a struggle it is at the beginning. Even the seemingly simple act of fretting a single note and playing it so it sounds clearly and not hitting any other strings is a nightmare.
And then there are the painful fingers without any calluses!
But the reward is the chords I mentioned and the ability to play single notes. This can lead to an early stage of experimentation, playing seemingly bizarre chords that you don’t yet fully understand.
Then comes the next obstacle… the dreaded barre!
The first encounter may be the open F major chord, a tricky mini bar that frustrates and hurts.
Do I now need a callus on the side of my finger?!
And then it’s time to climb that big old mountain. You might have been aware of it for a while but it’s in front of you now - barre chords.
How am I supposed to hold my index finger down across all of these strings AND play another chord with the other fingers?!
Why does it never sound clear? There’s always a wrong string muted or buzzing or sounding terrible!
Why does it hurt so much?!
Barre chords are a really versatile way to play a range of chords all over the neck of the guitar.
Being able to use moveable chords can open up your songwriting world as well. You can start to easily use a range of different keys to write your songs in. And it becomes easier to transpose songs to different keys.
But even within the barre chord world, there is a range of difficulty when it comes to clearly playing chords.
Barring the strings nearer to the nut is often more difficult, making the F major barre chord a particularly difficult task.
After getting to grips with barre chords I started to favour certain positions. Playing minor barre chords along the A string became the most comfortable to me. And it opened up a range of new chords.
This is where B minor walks into my life. Here was an interesting sounding chord that was easy to play clearly. You could also take the same shape and move it up to the E string to play a F ♯ (sharp) major chord. The two chords sounded good together and were nice to play.
Without knowing music theory in any level of detail this still presented me with new ideas for experimentation.
I had an old guitar case chord book that I enjoyed trying to copy chords from.
I would often look for the most exotic chords in the book and play them to see how they sounded. I went through a phase of hunting for chords that used all six strings of the guitar and had open strings ringing out.
I came across two chords that worked well together and sounded nice when played on acoustic guitar.
After practicing playing these two chords after one another, the next logical step was to reach to my favoured B minor chord.
Putting this all together with the F♯ Major chord, I had discovered a sound that really appealed to me.
I didn’t really understand how or why these chords worked together but it became a source of inspiration.
I assumed that because the progression started with B minor that it was in the key of B minor. And with that knowledge I went back to the chord book and quickly wrote the chords for an entire song.
This was the first time I had been inspired enough to write a whole song.
I didn’t stop at the chords either. I created lead parts, two solos and even tabbed out a bass part.
Later I sent a demo of the song to a friend who wrote some lyrics for it.
All of this spilling out from that B minor barre chord.
As a songwriter it can be easy to dismiss sounds and chords we are familiar with. But this familiarity is for a reason.
Maybe you go back to the same chords, riffs or scales because you enjoy playing them. That enjoyment can be what it takes to sustain you through the songwriting process and out the other side with a completed song!