gravitas

Phew, it's been a while since I browsed this site.

A few things that not everybody does but should when barring... You want to make sure that your finger is as close to the metal of the fret as possible. If you're way near the back of the fret space, you've got an entire wedge of air where your string can vibrate and make bad tone. Butting your index finger up against it will help to eliminate buzz.

Another thing to watch out for is proper hand posture. Your thumb should be on the exact opposite side of the guitar neck from where you're fretting. If you pick up a sheet of paper and hold it flat in your hand, you'll see a pretty good image of what holding the guitar neck should be like. Holding the guitar in a more personal way may seem to make it easier, but it will limit your fingers' range, block important strings, and rob you of most of the power you can get from your fingers.

As for improving your individual finger strengths, this is a cool anchoring exercise I used to get myself into shipshape. Bar with your index finger and arpeggiate the following chord on top of it, but the key is NOT to move your fingers at all until they are needed on other strings. It will test your flexibility and let you know about any flaws in your barring technique.

e:--------------------5h7p5--------------------------
B:-----------------5h8------8p5------------------------
G:-------------5h7--------------7p5--------------------
D:---------5h9----------------------9p5----------------
A:-----5h7------------------------------------------
E:-5h8---------------------------------------------

Depending on the rhythm you use to approach this, this can be either an AMin11 or AMin9 chord. Try it in eighths, triplets, and sixteenths and hear the difference

I'm... speechless

You know, Joe Pass never knew what a scale or arpeggio was, and Oscar Peterson wouldn't have anybody else heading up his rhythm section (except Oscar of course). Not knowing how to codify what you're playing doesn't restrict the kind of musician you are.

But yes, I hear what you're talking about now. When I say tonally, I mean as it relates to the progression- does it stick within the key, or does it jump around with it? The chorus sounds to me like a VI7 -ii - V7 - I with some spice thrown in. When you move into that verse type section it also sounds like you're moving between some of those chords with diminished sort of stepping stones, but at that point my ear kind of loses steam.

No yeah, I agree. There are only so many permuations of I-VII. But basically what you're doing in that example is to have your chords follow the melody? And if so, are you doing it tonally?

When you see a slash chord (G/B or Em/D) basically you move the root note (like G in a G Major chord or E in an E minor chord) to the note indicated behind the slash. So a G/B chord would be like taking a G Major chord and playing a B as the lowest note. You could play that like this:

G/B Chord:
e 3
B 0
G 0
D 0
A 2 (This is the B note)
E X (Here we're omitting the G note)

Emin/D Chord:
e 3
B 5
G 4
D 0 (D root instead of E root)
A X
E X

Also, a few charts for making your own extended/altered dominant chords: