Originally Posted by: jscott.saunders

After about three day of practicing barre chords my left index finger broke off and fell in the floor. I was actually not upset about it because I will never have to play barre chords again.

Thanks.

Scott,

Hope you pick it up and glue it back on, cause barre chords are an integral part of a guitar player's arsenal. Are all barre chords hard for you, or just certain ones ? (the F can be hard one, espcially if your guitar doesn't have a good setup. In the mean time, you can use partial chords (ok, so that isnt their technical name) using only two fingers.

Take a regular G barre chord: 355433, where you barre the all the strings at the 3rd fret with your first finger, and do an E shape with your other fingers (as if you had a capo on the 3rd fret).

A partial chord of the same G would be 35xxxx, where your first finger is on the 3fret of the the E string, and your 3rd finger on the 5th fret of the A string. Only two strings to fret, only two strings to strum, super easy, and you get to keep all your fingers.

And the bonus is that this shape can be moved up and down the fretboard to play all the major chords (some call these power chords). As another bonus, the same shape works on the 5th and 4th strings.

Good luck

Izzy