Course: E-shape Movable Chords

What are movable chords?

Movable chords are chord grips that can be played in any position up and down the neck, because they don’t have any open strings. Every string is either stopped at a fret, or muted by a convenient positioning of the hand.

About the E shape

The E shape is usually the first movable chord learned by beginning guitar players, typically introduced as the F major chord. It's famous for giving new guitarists all kinds of trouble, because it is usually presented as a barre chord, in which the first finger lays across the whole fretboard.

Barre chord alternatives

There are other ways to grip the E-shape chords that don't require a barre. For beginners, it's often easiest to gradually work up to barre chords after getting comfortable with one of these alternate shapes.

But barre chord alternatives are useful for advanced guitar players, too. Most of the non-barre movable shapes I play were adapted from common jazz chord grips. Not only are they more comfortable to play; they can fit better in awkward positions on the neck, and let us play longer without getting tired or sore.

The trick to playing movable chords without a barre is to get comfortable with muting individual strings inside a chord grip, so we can play shapes that don't include every string. It might seem like this would be absurdly difficult, but it turns out that certain chord grips naturally lend themselves to muting certain strings, almost automatically. Muting strings takes a bit of practice, but it's well worth getting comfortable with because it unlocks an enormous number of convenient chord grips all over the fretboard.

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