Learn the Asus4 Guitar Chord

String Systems / Chords & Rhythm Guitar

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What's an Asus4 chord?

    If you come across the Asus guitar chord symbol, you should know that it's just a simplification for Asus4. They both refer to the same chord. But the simplified "Asus" may be confused with other types of suspended chords. That's why I recommend using Asus4 instead, for greater clarity.


    "Sus" means that one of the main chord tones is replaced by a note next to it. In classical music, these "wrong" notes were called suspensions and were just temporary.


    The Asus4 chord for example would usually move to an A or an Am chord (which still sounds great). But in modern music, we may prefer a bit of dissonance. This means that we can also use suspensions without resolving them to regular chord tones 💪😎🎸.


    Regular major and minor chords (also called triads) are made of 3 notes that correspond to degrees 1, 3, and 5:

A and Am Chord Degrees

    For a Asus4 chord we replace the 3rd degree with the 4th degree (which is normally not a chord tone, but a scale tone):

Asus4 Chord Degrees

    Note: Chord tones in music theory are supposed to be spelled using odd numbers (that's why for example A2 is actually a wrong spelling for Aadd9). But the sus4 is an exception because historically the 4th degree was used a temporary scale tone.


How to play  the Asus4 on the Guitar

    You can play the Asus4 guitar chord in a few different ways. But the easiest one is this voicing here:

Asus4 Guitar Chord - Open Position

Sus4 moveable chord form

    The Asus4 chord voicing in the above diagram uses open strings, so it cannot be transposed to other keys. Here's a barre chord version that can be moved everywhere. The example below is for Dsus4. This one is a bit tricky (like most barre chords 😀).

Dsus2 Guitar Chord - Moveable Barre

    To move chords effectively around the fretboard, you need to learn the notes really well. I highly recommend that you get Fretboard Memorization Toolbox. This free mini-course includes fun drills and musical challenges that will help you master the fretboard very quickly 👍.


Tip 1 - Mix with Major or Minor

    A cool way to use the Asus4 chord is to mix it with the regular A or Am chords (similar to how they did it in classical music). Moving between the 4th and the 3rd degree creates an interesting musical effect.


    In most cases the 4th degree doesn't interfere with anything, so you can use the Asus4 to embellish an A or an Am in a song. Here are examples for both:

Tip 2 - Smooth Chord Progressions

    The suspended 4th in an Asus4 chord (the note D) usually happens to be an important chord tone for other chords in the same song. This means that you can inject the Asus4 between one of these chords and a regular A (or Am) to create a smoother chord progression.

    In the audio example below you will first hear the chord D going to an A. But then we'll interject that Asus4, so we'll go from a D to an Asus4, and then end on the A:

D to Asus4 to A Chord Progression

Tip 3 - Common Tone Progressions

    This is similar to what we did in the previous part, but this time we don't resolve the Asus4 to an A. Instead, we move between chords that share that sus4 note (a D on string 2).

D to Asus4 to G Chord Progression

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