Nailing Barre Chords

I have a question about playing barre chords.  I can play them cleanly as one offs and do pretty good doing 60 second chord changes between open chords and barre chords.  Where I struggle is doing chord progressions and using barre chords in songs playing rhythm.  Then I tend to get a little sloppy.  The question is I know that repetition is my friend but, does anyone have other suggestions to try to better nail barre chords playing rhythm in songs?

Thanks!

Work on landing all your freting fingers, on the Barr chord, at once.  If you do it one finger at a time you will never get up to speed in quick changing progressions.  You should work to make this one clean landing a part of your fingering any chord.  The goal is to make all your chord changes in a single move. Try to visualize the chord forms in your mind clearly.  Then start practicing how you manuver your fingers into those form. I used to practice this on my right forearm when watching tv or having a slack period at work.  Finally move that muscle memory to the fretboard, and focus on landing all your finger tips at once as you change from chord to chord. That is the goal when you want to make quick changes of any chord form. No matter how good you become at "one at a time finger tip landings", you will never be as fast as if you mastered the landing all at once trick, to begin with.

Luckily, like you said, "repitition is my friend".   Repitition is going to be your friend for as long as you play the instrument.  As long as you keep practicing regularly... as Lisa once said on this forum... "You will get there as soon as your body is ready to be there... no sooner."  Patient persistant practice pays. IMO...that is how you develop muscle memory and muscle memory is where instrumental mastery lives. 

Snojones is exactly right in mentioning muscle memory & getting the complete motion of each chord change at once.  So keep drilling them!

Here are a few other tips that can help.

Use less pressure.  You only need a certain amount of pressure or tension to fret notes.  Any more is wasted effort and hinders your ability to get from one postion or chord shape to the next efficiently.  But beginners tend to squeeze too tightly.  Especially on something as initially difficult as barre chords.  So experiment until you find the minimum amount of pressure required for your fingers to sound each chord.  This will help your fingers get more nimble & have more endurance.

Practice drilling each change separately from playing through a progression.  Just play each chord once, focusing on getting it exactly right with minimal tension.  Then switch to the next chord, playing it once.

The point here is to focus on the motion required for the chord change.  Don't waste time & effort strumming or playing through a whole progression.  Just focus on one chord, strum, next chord, strum, repeat.  This is the kind of repetitious practice that really helps focus on getting certain specific motions into your muscle memory.  Then you can count on your hands to do the change while you start to add in the other elements:  strumming, playing the progression, staying in time.

Isolating difficult tasks can be an important step for some learners.

Hope that helps!

Just realized that it would be good to also point out that barr chords take time to master.  Everybody has to do some serious woodshedding to master these chords.  I spend years finally mastering the hyper finger extention of the A form barr chord.  Just keep at it and one day it will just start working for you. 

Thanks for all the great advice!