CAGED and pentatonic patterns

Sorry Jim, a few things going on at the moment keeping me busy.

Can you give me any examples of what you think you’ve got and then haven’t?

Depending on what you’re reading, and who’s selling it, it’s very easy to expect too much from the CAGED system. If you think of it as not much more than something to help navigate the fretboard then you’re probably on the right track.

The CAGED patterns are really just a reference to help easily and quickly find chord tones and associated scales. Wherever you have a major pentatonic, you have a relative minor three frets down.

This is easy to visualise for something like the open G major chord, the chord pattern itself looks a lot like the pentatonic scale pattern of E minor or G major pentatonic.

Some chord patterns are more useful than others. For instance, the E form of G major (G major bar chord) doesn’t really look a lot like the major pentatonic scale if you are relating it to all six strings. If you think of scales from their root notes then things are easier to relate. For example, think of the G major pentatonic starting on the fourth string, then it’s easier to see it fit inside the chord.

E |—————–3–5—-|
B |———–3–5———-|
G |—–2–4—————-|
D |–5———————-|
A |————————–|
E |————————–|

It’s a bit messy trying to show this with ascii diagrams but … the bold notes of the scale outline the first four strings of the G major bar chord.

For E minor pentatonic we’ll have the same notes in the scale but we’ll relate it to another chord pattern. In this case it would be the D minor form, i.e., move the open D minor chord up two frets and you’ll have E minor. Here are those notes in bold.

E |——————–3–5—-|
B |————–3–5———-|
G |——–2–4—————-|
D |–2–5———————-|
A |—————————–|
E |—————————–|

If you can think about chords and scales in this way for all of the scale / chord positions then it will make more sense. It takes a lot of work and you need to be able to find notes easily on the fretboard but the more you do it the more it will all come together.

You don’t necessarily need to know this stuff inside out to make it useful. I know all of it but I don’t use all of it regularly. This means things get forgotten or might take a while to think about, it doesn’t really matter, just pick your favourites and use them, the blanks tend to get filled in on their own. I personally think about these things in chord and scale fragments, for example, three, four, or five strings instead of always six, and then piece them together as a whole.