What is the CAGED system? Learning the main open chords early on in your playing is commonplace for most if not all guitarists. However, there’s a little more to it than just a series of shapes that conveniently hit the notes we need to form each chord. Each chord is a moveable shape that plays a different chord when moved to a different position of the fretboard. The key is knowing where the root note lands to help you define which chord you’re playing.
The guitar chord shapes, five in major and five in minor are more than just a handful of chords played around the first three frets. Once you’ve got these comfortably learned and locked into your day to day guitar playing, you can immediately expand your chord vocabulary with a simple trick.
How does the CAGED system work?
Using the common chord shapes of C, A, G, E, D and their minor equivalents, you can map out the entire fretboard into five sections. This can help to breakdown the neck by helping us to understand how these chord shapes relate to how notes are arranged on the guitar.
Understanding how these two elements of the fretboard interplay with each other should help to visualise how the guitar’s neck is really a series of shapes and patterns.
Each of the above open chords can be positioned anywhere on the neck to form a totally different chord. You will of course, need to learn to barre the frets where the nut of the guitar would normally be. For example, if you moved the open E chord up 1 fret, you would need to barre your first finger across the first fret entirely. This gives you an F of course.
If you’ve already got a good grasp of chords and you already know how to play E and A form barre chords, then this process should quickly make sense! These are commonly the first 2 CAGED forms guitarists will learn and is a great introduction to the whole system.
Linking the shapes together.
A great way to start associating the notes on the board in relation with the open shapes is to work with one chord tonality and play all of the individual shapes that give you a C chord. Easiest one to start with is C as this should not only help to define the shapes and patterns on the neck in front of you, but show an easy way to locate a C note in various positions on the board.
At a glance, this is just a series of dots across the fretboard. Start from the top and you can identify the C shape. Thinking about where the lowest note of the C chord is, this is the same position for the C chord in the A chord. Using this knowledge, you can see the A shape forming your C major.
The shapes are connected in the order that CAGED is spelt. Once you get to the D form, the pattern repeats as you’ve hit the octave and passed the twelfth fret. Try following the C chord up using the diagram to see if you can play and hear the C chord in it’s various positions up the neck.
To help, your root notes should be on the following frets and strings;
- C in it’s natural open chord form. The root note is on the 3rd fret of the A string.
- To connect the open C to the A form chord, from your 1st root note, look to the 5th fret G string to find the root note in the A shape.
- Next, the G form, the A shape gives you the upper part of the G form chord as you find your root note on the 8th fret of both E strings.
- The root notes of the G form chord are shared by the E form. In C you’ll find these once again on the 8th fret. With the root found within the E shape on the 10th fret D string.
- And before we arrive back at the C shape, the root for the D shape is the same found within the E shape. Start on your D string on the 10th and then form your usual D chord shape from the 12th fret. The root within the C is found on the B string’s 13th fret.
- To connect the D form back to the C, barre across the 12th fret and form your open C chord shape underneath it.
And finally.
Once you have an understanding of how the shapes link in to each other, it should help to visualise where the individual root notes can be found across the board. You can link these distances together with a series of shapes which in turn, will begin to form the arpeggios within each chord form. For a deeper understanding of barre chords in general, head here.
Need a little more help working on your technique and finding different chord positions using the CAGED system? Get in touch and book a free lesson today!