How To Play An Fm Chord on Guitar

The Fm chord doesn’t come up as often as some of the other barre chords like Bm and F#m but it is a common enough chord that it’s worth knowing how to play.

Lucky for us, it’s a barre chord so it will fall the ‘Em shape’ as a 6 string chord and the ‘Am shape’ as a 5 string chord. I will explain below.

5 String Fm Chord on Guitar

The great thing about this barre chord is that if you have learned the popular Bm chord, then playing the Fm chord will be very easy.

OK maybe not so easy if you haven’t mastered barre chords yet, but you will get there. I promise.

The barre occurs at the 8th fret and you can see that your other 3 fingers are in the shape of an ‘Am’ chord. So all you would have to do is slide your Bm chord up a few frets and tada! You have a Fm chord.

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6 String Fm Chord on Guitar

Now if you’re playing open chords, the 6 string option will probably be faster to get to.

As you can see from the diagram, this Fm chord requires you to barre four strings with only 1 finger at the 1st fret.

The 1st fret is the hardest fret to barre at. Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t sound perfect the first time. Often times, students will have trouble getting the bottom two strings (B and e) to ring through but no problem with the top 4 strings.

This issue is caused by not having enough pressure on the bottom part of the barre. It will come with time, so keep practicing and focus on squeezing the bottom of that finger.

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