Building the A Major Chord on the Guitar

Video Transcript

"MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. Now, we're going to take a look at our A major shape, we're going to review the notes in our A major, and then we're going to take a look at the scale degrees and how we build it from there. So that way we can then go and manipulate that chord into other types of chords, specifically the minor and the seventh shape. So if we review our scale degree setup and how we build the scale, we find that the notes for the A major chord are A, that's our 1; C sharp, that's going to be our 3; and E, that's our 5. And if we look here at the A major diagram, we find that we have all those notes in our chord. We've got our A, that's our base. Again, like we said, we'll always going to have 1 to be our base. We've got an E next, that's our 5. We've got another A here, and that's okay; we can double them and we can put them in any order. We've got our C-sharp here on the second string. And we've got another E up here. And again, looking back at our scale degrees, we've got 1, 5, 1, 3 and 5. So, we've got two 1s, two 5s, and just one 3 there. When we play it, again you've already reviewed this on the chord shapes diagram. It's just our basic A major shape. We can play it in a few different ways. We'll play it in this one for now."