With a handful of Grammy wins under his belt – and the instantly recognisable Red Eye Les Paul under his fingers – southern rock great Jason Isbell knows what it takes to master the electric guitar.
But despite such mastery, there was one particular aspect of guitar that he struggled with early on, and it’s something that all beginners struggle with: barre chords. In a new interview, Isbell discussed why learning barre chords is such an important but challenging skill to gain.
Guesting on the Guitar Moves podcast with the Hard Quartet guitarist Matt Sweeney, Isbell has offered a book’s worth of sage advice for beginning players. Barre chords receive particular attention, as they were something his first guitar teachers were “serious” about.
Isbell grew up in North Alabama, a stone’s throw from his grandparents’ farm, and it was his grandfather and uncle who shaped his early musicianship by introducing him to the guitar and mandolin from the age of six.
“My granddad was really serious about barre chords,” he explains. “Him and my uncle both were like, ‘You’re going to know how to play a barre chord,’ and what they call barre E and barre A.”
Those two names relate to the chord shape within the barre chord, with a player’s first finger essentially playing the role of a capo to perform the major and minor shapes across the neck.
“You’re just moving the nut up the neck,” he adds. But even if the concept is simple, the execution didn’t prove to be quite so simple for a young Isbell.
“It’s tough to learn. Barre chords are the biggest pain in the ass of all guitar playing learning,” he says. “If you can get past that hump, congratulations, you can be a guitar player forever now.
“That’s really the one thing that it takes. Like, ‘Can you play barre chords without stopping and going off and doing something different?’”
Using his 2020 track If We Were Vampires as an example, he splits an open C chord between the bass notes, played with his thumb “nice and steady”, and the melody on the higher strings, which he plays with his fingers. Then, as the idea progresses, the same concept is applied further up the neck, rooted on the third fret, showing the possibilities that barre chords can bring to chordal movements beyond a reliance on open strings.
It’s an idea that stems, he says, from learning to play Chet Atkins’ The Bells of St Mary’s as a kid.
“There’s no way I’d have written that song without knowing the other thing,” Isbell confesses. “It’s not like everybody listens to my music like, ‘Oh, he listened to Chet Atkins as a kid.’ You get to cycle it in and mix it all up.”
One thing Isbell doesn’t mention, which is crucial to new learners tackling barre chords efficiently, is that it can be a painful endeavor. Locking your first string in place to act as the moving nut takes time and patience before it starts to feel second nature, and the pain of doing it consistently starts to cease.
But, as Isbell proves, when barre chords are conquered, a player’s chordal possibilities increase exponentially.
In August last year, Isbell worked with pickup genius Tim Shaw for an array of versatile Tele tones with his signature pickup set. That came a year after “possibly the greatest amplifier ever made“ resurfaced after 40 years in the dark. The guitarist is now the proud owner of that particular Dumble amp, and it has quite the story to tell.
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