This article, “The A Shape Chord,” is the third in my CAGED Foundations series. Be sure to read the Introduction article and hop over to the Low G Knowledge Base to see all articles in the series as well as other helpful tools for learning low G ukulele.
There’s a downloadable PDF with all of the chord charts from this article at the end of the second page.
Today we are looking at the workhorse A shape chord. You’re probably pretty familiar with a A minor chord because it appears in the keys of C and G. A major doesn’t get nearly an as much attention, but its moveable shape and variations are crazy useful and important on ukulele.
Here’s the standard issue A major chord:
Major chords are made of the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the major scale, also known as the root, the major third, and the perfect 5th. For the A major chord, those notes are:
A B C# D E F G 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Make the Ukulele A Shape Moveable
To make the A major chord moveable, we need to ignore the notes and only think about the intervals, or the numbers behind the notes – that 1, 3, and 5 I just mentioned. Here’s the chord again but with numbers for the intervals instead of the note names:
Now let’s turn the A chord into something you can move around and place anywhere you want on the neck:
This is now the A shape major chord. We call it an “A shape” out of convenience, but really it can be any major chord – you just have to put the 1’s on the root note of your choice. You’ll often hear this referred to as a “major chord shape with a root on the G string.”
You play this shape by placing your ring finger on the fret of your choice on the G string, placing your middle finger one fret up on the C string, and then barring across all four strings with your index finger one fret up from your middle finger.
For those who find this barre shape too challenging, jump down to the “Make These Chords Easier to Play” section below.
Make the Ukulele A Shape Part of a Scale
Chords are more useful if you understand where the other notes of the parent scale fall on the fretboard. Knowing the relationship between chords and scales allows you to modify the chord without memorizing every conceivable shape and compose/arrange melodies in the key of the chord with ease.
Here’s what the A shape major scale looks like:
And here’s the moveable major chord shape within the scale:
Notice that I’ve shifted these up a fret from most of the previous chord diagrams. These charts are actually showing the A# major scale and chord so that all of the notes fall on the fretboard instead of having open strings.
Just remember: Wherever you put the 1, you are playing the major scale of that note. And within that scale, you can find all of the possible chords.
Chords live inside of scales. This is an important idea to wrap your head around. We’ll explore it a lot more as we learn to modify the A shape later in this article.
Make the Ukulele A Shape Minor
The chord modification we use most often is the minor. We use it so often that we don’t think of it as a modification of the major chord. We think of it as its own, independent thing, even though major and minor are closely related.
We get a minor chord by flatting the 3rd of a major chord, making the three notes of the minor chord the root (1), the minor 3rd (b3), and the perfect 5th (5).
Here’s what that looks like on the neck as a moveable shape related to our A shape:
The moveable A minor shape is one of the most useful minor shapes in the CAGED system. As long as you can form the full barre, the A minor shape is great because it is easy to remember and easy to locate with roots on the G and A string. And because it uses all four strings, it sounds especially full, even more so because it has two root notes.
If you can’t manage these barres, however, don’t worry, because I’m about to show you how to…
Make These Chords Easier to Play
The major and minor moveable shapes can both be simplified to create two different three-string triads each that are easier to play than their barre-chord brethren. Here’s the low version of the major triad:
This simple diagonal shape is easier to switch to quickly than the four-string barre shape, and it sounds great, especially on a low G uke, because the root note remains the lowest note.
You can also play the high three strings of the shape for a complete triad, though I find this shape awkward to make without using a barre across the top:
You also have to options for your minor triad. You can either use the familiar three-in-a-row shape rooted on the A string that is also part of the C shape:
Or you can leave the A string out of the full moveable minor shape:
Continue to the next page to learn how to further modify the A Shape…
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