Hi guys.
In this lesson I'm showing you how to play the A major chord
which is the second chord that I recommend that absolute beginners learn
So let's get in for a closeup straight away
This is the A major chord
and it can also be played like this
but I'd really recommend sticking to this way of playing it
because it will really help with the transition
between the first chord we learned (the E) and the A chord
Because that first finger doesn't lift off
so we don't have a mad panic where we go "Ah! where do my fingers go?!"
So this is the way I would recommend that we learn this A chord
but I will show you the other one as well
So we have our first finger on the 2nd fret and it's the third string so 123 from the lowest
This one needs to be in the middle of the fret
because our middle finger
is gonna go just above it
on string 4
also on the 2nd fret
Your third finger goes directly below that first finger
so they're all on different strings
also at the second fret and that's on string two.
When we strum this chord we want to strum it from string five.
The reason for that is that thickest string is called the E string and the next one is called the A string
So that 'A' is the lowest note we want heard in this 'A chord'.
We can do that by just strumming from string 5
and if we have each finger right on the tip and you're not touching the bottom
of the guitar (neck) like this all five string should ring out
So that one more time we have first finger, second finger, third finger
and they're all on the 2nd fret.
To check that (each string) is ringing out
we pick each individual string from string five (so not the thickest one)
we want to pick it from string five and go through each one
and we can hear that they're ringing out great
We do also have this way of playing an A chord, which is entirely valid and when I first learned (to play) guitar
this was the only area code I knew of
its only since I've been teaching, that I've found that the other one is really useful
So with this one we have a first finger on the 2nd fret of the 4th string,
middle finger, 2nd fret just below it
and 3rd finger, again just below that
So this is far easier to visualize
However when you stop playing guitar and trying to learn songs you'll find that
actually pressing the fingers and learning the (chord) 'shape' is tricky at first but it's ok to learn it
It will come quite quickly. It's changing between the chords and putting everything
together that makes everything quite difficult. So this...
...is certainly a valid and a great A chord, that I would go for this way of playing it
from example A (the first one)
So this is that A chord shown in a 'chord diagram'. We can see we've got a little X
on the thickest string and that means that we don't wanna play string six
essentially and .... this is the chord diagram for this example, A (chord)
So we've got (finger) 1 in the middl, 2 above it and 3 below it and everything is on that
second fret and the tricky thing is generally making sure that all five
strings ring out which you can check by picking each individual one and keeping
your fingers right on the tips on making sure we don't tough the bottom of the guitar (neck)
They're the key points of getting a great sounding A major chord
so that's how to play our first two major chords
Now, it's very tempting for people to want to
learn more chords so they can do more songs but I've managed to find ten songs
that use just these two chords and those already have videos for each one of
those some lessons on my website at andyguitar.co.uk but what we want
to do before we get to those songs, which I recommend going to soon as possible,
.. we want to get the changes between these two chord down (memorised) so that's
gonna be in the next lesson that follows this one how much change between the E
and A major chords and then you can learn some strumming patterns and then we can
get you on to learn some songs.
Hopefully I'll see you in one of those next lessons thank you very much for watching and bye for now!
You can download this video and the eBook that goes with this entire course
by clicking in this area here, click over there to watch the next lesson here on
YouTube, please subscribe if you haven't already and all those links are in
description if you are watching on mobile!