Hi Lee, read your Guitar Theory book, and now studying it vigorously. Left you a 10 star review on Amazon.
I’ve worked on the CAGED system very hard, but still struggle to come away with something I can really use from it. What can (should) be learned from CAGED that is practical and useful?
Thanks, Sutton
Hi Sutton, that’s very kind of you, thanks. Hope you are finding it useful.
CAGED system is very much worth learning but like everything else it takes a lot of practice and experimenting before you can find it useful. The first thing I recommend is to drop the word “system” and just call it CAGED chords. The problem with the word ‘system’ is it makes us think of it as some kind of mystical technique that can be used, it’s not really like that.
CAGED chords are probably at the heart of fretboard navigation and opening up the neck to give you more choices, which leads to new ideas. You can’t learn this stuff quickly.
You don’t necessarily need to memorise the full chord shapes across all six strings. A lot of the time when I think about CAGED chords I think chord fragments. For instance, think of the open D major chord on just the top three strings. Move this along two frets and you have an E chord. Move it up again so that the 2nd string is at the tenth fret and you have an A chord.
If you are playing over a chord progression A, D, E … you now have three places you can play around with chord tones while you solo. The goal is to be able to find them quickly. With this idea you could play some very simple solos using just those notes over each chord change on the top three strings. It doesn’t need to be complicated, just a very basic solo with those notes over the chord changes will sound like you know what you are doing and gets you away from just playing scales all of the time.
If you now do the same with the A form chord at the fifth fret and E form chord at the fifth fret, using just the top four strings you can now play around with the same idea but now you keep all of the notes closer together which sounds more natural.
You could now mix these ideas with your A major scale or A major pentatonic maybe and suddenly you have a whole new way of soloing where you can focus more on chord tones so that you are not just running up and down scales all of the time.
That’s a simple way of looking at using CAGED chords but should get you right into a new way of thinking. Of course it doesn’t need to be lead guitar, they can also be used for rhythm playing to add some variation or give you another place to play so that you aren’t doing the same thing as another guitarist in the band.
All of this takes quite a while to get comfortable with because you need to be able to find the chords in various positions quickly. Start simple, this way you start to see the point of them and once you do that, you are on your way to putting it all to good use.
I’m busy right now but if I get a chance this week I’ll try to add a few diagrams to make the above clearer.
Hope that helps 🙂
