A Maj7 Guitar Chord Charts and Definition

Understanding A Maj7

The A Maj7 guitar chord (A Major Seventh) is a common alternative to the A chord. It is a useful chord for acoustic and jazz styles.

A Maj7 Chord Notes

The notes are: A-C#-E-G#

A Maj7 Chord Intervals

The intervals for every major seventh chord are 1-3-5-7 (root, third, fifth, seventh).

How to play the A Maj7 Guitar Chord

There are countless ways to play an A Major 7 chord. Find the notes A-C#-E-G#, play them together, and you’ll have an A Maj7 chord!

You can also play the A chord with an omitted fifth (E), which gives you the notes A-C#-G#.

Open A Maj7

This chord was featured in this post: Top 10 Beautiful Guitar Chords (And How to Use Them)

It’s the most common open shape for the chord, and it’s the shape you’ll see used the most.

A Maj7 Jazz Shape

You can play the root note for this shape on both the high E and Low E strings.

I call this the jazz shape because I rarely see this shape outside of jazz, and the interval layout is easy to memorize. The simple interval layout makes it easy to substitute notes or change chord types (Exl. A Maj7 to AMin7).

A Maj7 jazz shape (mute the A and E strings)

A Maj7 (no 5th)

This is the same shape as before, but the fifth interval is omitted.

A Maj7 Jazz shape, but the 5th interval is removed (on the B string)

A Maj7 4-fret Shape

I call this the 4-fret shape because it uses 4 adjacent frets moving backward. These 4 frets are played with fingers 4 through 1 (pinky to index), descending from the D string to the high E string.

Aside from the open shape, this is probably the next most common A maj7 shape.

A Maj7 4 fret shape. Notes descend and use all 4 fingers in order of 4-3-2-1.

A Maj7 Bar 1 (Root on D)

This is the most popular barred position for the A Maj7 guitar chord. This is arguably because the bass note (lowest note) is the root note.

A Maj7 Bar 2 (Root on G)

This is another A Maj7 Barre shape, with the root note occurring on the G string. Think of this like your open A chord with an added major 7th note (G#) occurring at the 4th fret of the high E string.

A Maj7 (Root on B)

This is my personal favorite maj7 chord shape as a whole. The root note is on the B string, and you can remember this like two power chord shapes put together. One starts at C#, and the other starts at A.