Many guitarists learn to play by imitating recordings. This style of learning allows guitarists to master both new songs and new techniques. To imitate a song, a guitarist repeatedly listens to a song recording until the entire song, or the desired portion of that song, can be reproduced by the guitarist. This kind of imitation can be a very difficult process particularly if the recorded guitarist plays fast and other instruments are involved. Besides the difficulty in hearing the guitar music, the many different ways to finger and articulate the same notes and chords on a guitar, can also make playing the music difficult. In this paper, we describe some of the knowledge guitarists use to minimize these difficulties. We then propose an external representation that guitarists can use to unload some of the cognitive burden imposed by the imitation process. This external representation — the bar chord — transform many of the imitation activities from those requiring both internal computations and memory to those that require the guitarist to merely look and see the desired results. Moreover, bar chords facilitate the social distribution of these individual benefits. This research contributes to the growing field of distributed cognition and to our understanding of both internal and external representations used during music learning and improvisation.