The ‘A’ shape is another of the fundamental chord shapes on the guitar, and you’re highly likely to use it a lot throughout your life as a guitar player.
As with the ‘D shape’, the ‘A shape’ is a movable shape. Once you learn the shape, you can move the same shape up and down the fretboard to play ANY major chord! More on that, later.
How an ‘A Major’ Chord is Formed
In its simplest form, a major chord is made up of 3 notes – the root, the major third and the perfect fifth. (If that sounds like nonsense, bear with me, it will all become clear as we continue throughout the course). The terms ‘major third’ and ‘perfect fifth’ refer to the note interval relationship to the root note. Basically, how far we’re going from the root.
In the chord diagram, the notes with a blue background are the root note. The root note gives the letter name to the chord.
For example, the ‘A’ in ‘A Major’. A is our root note and the note on the second fret of the G string is A, and so it has a blue background.
Notice the open ‘A’ string has a blue ‘O’, showing that it is also a root note. You might have noticed that this means we’re playing the note ‘A’ twice in this chord. That’s OK! That’s very common in guitar chords. As we have six strings to play with, often chord shapes will repeat notes. This just adds to the rich texture of guitar chords (and often makes them easier to play, as it means we don’t have to skip or mute strings in the middle of our chords).
In an A major chord, the other two notes are:
Major Third – C# (pronounced “C sharp”) – The third gives us the quality of the chord, major or minor. In this case, major. It is the ‘third’ because it is the third note of the A major scale, which is the origin of this chord. A major third is always 4 semitones above the ‘tonic’ note in a scale. The tonic is what we call the root note of our chord when it’s used as the starting point for a scale.
Perfect Fifth – E – the fifth note of the A major scale. The fifth is sometimes known as the ‘dominant’ interval and is always 7 semitones above the tonic note.
How To Play A Major on the Guitar
Note: An ‘X’ above a string means don’t strum that string. An ‘O’ means you strum that string without pressing down on any frets. It means ‘open’.
Your fingers go in a straight line, all in a row, all on the second fret.
Now strum the strings, from the A string (5th string) all the way to the high E string.
Troubleshooting
If it doesn’t sound quite right, don’t worry! We’re going to work on that. An important part of learning anything is to know where to look when things go wrong.
Firstly, pluck each string, one at a time.
Are the notes sounding clear or muffled? If some are sounding muffled, try pressing a little bit harder on those ones until they sound clear. You are aiming for the minimum amount of pressure to make the notes sound clearly. We don’t want to be wasting energy or the comfort of our poor finger tips by pressing any harder than we need to. It can take a little while to find the right pressure, but you’ll get there by paying close attention, until it becomes second nature.
Check if anything is getting in the way. Are any of your fingers accidentally touching a string they shouldn’t be? Try adjusting your hand position and fingers to make sure they are only touching the intended strings. (See fretting guide for more info).
Next Steps
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