An A Major guitar chord is made up of three different notes. The root note is A, the perfect 5th is an E note and the major 3rd is a C# note. In this video guitar chord lesson you will learn the A guitar chord in several different positions on the fret board:

First you will learn the simplist type of an A guitar chord, which is an A5 powerchord, which consists of only two different notes: the root note (A) and the perfect 5th (E). This powerchord is neither major nor minor in sound and therefore works well when played with both major and minor scales, as all powerchords do!
For the open position A guitar chord there are three possible fingerings that you can use:

1 – your pinky (4), ring (3) and middle (2):

2 – your ring (3), middle (2) and index (1) fingers:

3 – your index finger (1) only:

After this, we take a look at a barre chord and partial thumbed A guitar chord, beginning at the 5th fret of the E string:

Thumbed A guitar chord:

This A thumbed chord might be hard to play if you have small hands or a hard time holding down the E string using your thumb, but keep trying since it’s worth it to master this thumb technique! This guitar lesson finishes with another barre chord shape, starting at the 12th fret position on the A string (an A note). This chord is an octave version of the open position A chord, which means that all the notes are played up one octave higher (an octave is a distance of 12 notes).

Remember that all of these chord shapes contain the same notes that make up an A guitar chord: A, E and C#. Be sure to sign up for your free guitar chord book if you want to print these diagrams and TABs off.