How you doing? Justin here.
Hopefully, you've done a little bit of practice
and you've got your D chord sounding really cool.
So, because I don't know any songs at all
that have just got one chord all the way through,
I guess we need to learn another one.
And this next one we're going to check out is the chord A.
Now there's quite a few different ways of fingering this chord.
And the one that I'm going to show you,
the one that I think is the best now,
isn't the one I learned.
So sometimes you'll see me playing A chord another way.
But the way that I'm going to show you works really, really really good
for swapping between your D chord and your A chord,
which is one of the biggest problems you have when you're a beginner,
is changing between the chords.
It's not actually playing the chords,
but we haven't gotten to that yet.
You've still got to discover that horrible bit of learning the guitar,
that "Oh my god I can't move my fingers fast enough"-stage.
But we'll get there very soon.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you
my recommended way of playing an A chord,
and then I'm going to show you a couple of alternatives
that maybe you've learned before or whatever.
And if you really want to do one of those other ones, then do it,
but I will hopefully give you enough good reasons
to play the A chord with my suggested fingering.
So, let's go to a close-up and check out the A chord.
So here we are for a little close look up at our A chord.
Here we go. So the first thing we're going to do is go
through the fingers and get the fingers in the right places.
Now first thing you'll notice is:
first finger is actually in the same place as it was for our D chord.
But, we're going to have to pull it back a little bit.
So it would be nice to have it right up close to the fret,
but unfortunately we can't.
So start with this one in the middle of the fret.
I'm going to explain why in a second.
So that's our first finger. Pretty easy : second fret, third string.
Then second finger is going to reach over the top
you see, this is why we had to leave the space there,
so we've got space here for the second finger
to go on the fourth string, second fret.
And then third finger is sneaking also into the second fret,
but on the second string.
So you can see they're all kind of getting a bit squashed up here.
Now, you'll notice here that the second finger and the third finger
are both really close to the second fret which is great,
and only the first finger has to be back a bit.
And this is the fingering for an A chord that I really recommend.
Now, the traditional approach,
which is the one that I did, is like this.
With the fingers one, two and three all in a row.
Then you can see that we can't get our second finger much further forward anyway
because third finger is in the way,
and it means that first finger is miles back from the fret
and we'd have to press that really hard in order to get that note to come out clearly.
Very likely it's going to sound like this
. . .
you're not going to get that note sounding very clear,
whereas if now you just see we swap first and second fingers over
. . .
straight away we can get those two fingers up close
and first finger you can kind of sneak it up.
Sneak it up the back there, with the first finger
to try and get it as close to the fret as we possibly can
So that's the old approach, I think this is a much better approach
Some people even prefer to do it like this,
with fingers two, three and four,
particularly if they've got really big fingers.
Some people find that a little bit easier.
Now I'm not a big fan of this method.
it's possible, cause so long as you're pressing down the dots, you're OK.
But I really, really recommend that you do these fingers:
one on the third string,
then reaching over with the second finger
and then the third finger.
So, now what we're going to do is
remember that we check out each note one at a time.
We do the strum, pick out and strum
and make any corrections that we need to,
to make sure that every note sounds good.
This is really important.
Also, by looking at the neck diagram there,
you can also notice that we shouldn't play now
the thickest string
because that's got a little X at the top.
So we're not going to play the thickest string.
So we're just going to start our strum
from the fifth string. Strum down
. . .
and now as we go to a close-up,
we're going to check out the possible things
that might make the notes sound funny as we do one note at a time. So,
. . .
There's your open A string. If there's a mistake there,
it means that your second finger is up too far,
so bring it down. It should be an easy note to get.
Next note is the note with our second finger on,
which is on the fourth string.
Want to make sure that that's nice and clear.
There's not really too many things
that can make that note go wrong
so that one should be easy. Next note :
. . .
Now what you may find is cause your first finger is back quite far
. . .
that you get this kind of sound.
Now that's only because the finger is so far away from the fret,
the only way that you're going to fix it
is to try and bring it closer to the fret if you can
and also to press harder.
Even if you're right back
. . .
if you press really hard, you will get that note clear.
So try and sneak it up as best you can,
and then press a bit harder with that first finger
if that note's a bit causing you problems.
Third finger shouldn't be giving you any grief.
Just make sure it's nicely seated,
make sure it's not on the fret.
Cause as soon as you get on the fret
. . .
gets a bit dead. Behind the fret :
. . .
nice and clear. If it's on the fret :
. . .
kind of goes a bit dead. So make sure it's behind the fret
. . .
Now last one
. . .
is the E string.
A lot of people have problems with the E string
because the third finger here touches the E string.
It's all fingers touching the wrong strings
the cause of most of our problems.
So we want to make sure
that the third finger is nice and round,
you can see that all of the fingers are kind of arched around.
Don't let your fingers do this,
like they're too flat.
That's always going to lead to problems.
Nice and round.
. . .
And that should lead you to have a nice A chord.