Hey Friend,

I really wish someone had shown me some of the alternatives to the B minor barre chord when I was first starting out on guitar.

B minor was intimidating to me. I played an acoustic guitar with horrible action (the space between the strings and the fingerboard). I was just a kid, and my fingers were barely strong enough to press the strings down on regular chords, let alone a barre chord.

On top of that, because the most commonly used version of the chord is located at the second fret, you've got the added string tension so close to the nut. It would have been nice to know about the various positions and inversions instead of avoiding songs that called for a B or B minor chord. Just saying...

You got almost a dozen B minor triads yesterday, so there are no excuses for incorporating the B minor chord in your playing.

You can also get away with using a B5 power chord to fill in for the barre chord if you're just not up to it. In some cases it makes sense to use the power chord, such as when you're playing a hard Rock or Punk tune and using distortion. The higher pitched notes get a bit lost in the growl of distortion, so you don't really miss them in cases like this.

That said, you should be familiar with the barre chord version. You never know when you may need the extra notes in the chord to help a song section fill out and sound bigger. 

Songs played on acoustic  can benefit from using the full barre chords because of the range of notes, so look at the exercises and play through them (even if you're already a B minor barre chord master!).

Practice is always good - as long as you are focusing on the task at hand and not just fiddling around. The exercises are short, and five or ten minutes of focus on B minor can go a long way. 

Don't get frustrated if your index finger doesn't cooperate - it's an unruly child and will fight you if you let it. It just takes repeated effort to get your fingers to do what you want them to do.

Patterns and repetition. Keep working at these chords every day for a few minutes and before long, you'll be playing any chord with ease. Rock it out!

Peace~

Dave