An A is an A is an A

Yesterday I visited my father, and we played a little music after dinner.

We do not have similar tastes in music and we don't play together much. Actually I don't play with anyone often, something that shows in my timing. Lately I've taken to playing with the songs as they come over my Alexa so I can get my timing back in sync with the world instead of the beat that rests inside of me.

While my father was trying to let me lead the music, he was having trouble watching my fingers as they changed chords. For one thing, I've always been very quick to change chords on the guitar. I remember him complaining about that when we played together when I was 12 years old. So that is nothing new.

I was playing Peaceful, Easy Feeling by the Eagles - it's a relatively easy song, in the key of E, with chord changes of A, F#m, and B. Nothing too hard.

He couldn't figure out my A, though. I play it in the second fret, first, fifth strings open, 6th string untouched, a finger each on the second, third, and fourth strings. Like this:

But my father makes an A chord by barring the second, third, and fourth strings, and stretching his little finger out to the fifth fret to turn the lower E string into an A. (I actually cannot find an example of that on the Internet. I think it's an old-school A. Still an A, just not the most obvious one.)

There are so many ways to make a single chord on a guitar that there is no "right" way to do it. Dad wanted to tell me that I wasn't making an "A" chord until his own chord chart showed the above.

Here is A in the fifth fret, using a barre chord:

It's basically an "E" chord moved down five frets on the guitar fret board. You can do that with any position. You can use the D position and move it down to the 9th fret and you'd have an A (you wouldn't play the 4th, 5th, and 6th strings, though, unless you barred the chord).

This is all basically guitar theory, and once I grasped it when I first started playing I didn't have much trouble moving over the fretboard. I am not a lead guitar player - I prefer simply strumming and singing, with an occasional lick thrown in but not often. I also like to finger style and not use a pick, which makes the guitar hard to hear sometimes. I don't need to move all over the fretboard but I like to if I can.

Anyway, we had a nice time playing. He had a new guitar, a Guild, which was a smaller body than most of his dreadnought guitars and I could play that better. He uses a heavier gauge string than I do - I prefer light gauge strings -  so my fingers tired a little more quickly than they do when I'm playing on my little Taylor, but it was a good reminder that I need to keep those callouses forming on the ends of my fingers on my left hand.