Hopefully by now you understand how the CAGED system helps to navigate, and link up the fretboard. Maybe you’ve even explored the chord & scale diagrams category to learn other patterns from the CAGED system.
But now its time to explore its short-comings, and wrap up this series (finally… phew!).
Today we’re going to examine a particular set of very common chord shapes, which don’t seem to fit in the CAGED system…. or do they?
So far our look at the CAGED system has been limited to scales and chords, but the CAGED system also works nicely with arpeggios too.
Like we did in the first CAGED article, today we are going to begin with the basic open shapes of the various seventh chords, and then develop moveable, and barred versions of those open chords.
We’ve seen how CAGED is essentially a fretboard map. By simplifying the neck down into easy to grasp pieces we make the neck easier to navigate. But simply understanding the system won’t improve our playing, we need to find ways of applying the fretboard map. This post looks at CAGED as it applies to scale shapes.
In CAGED Part 1, we saw how the CAGED system can be used to help beginner-intermediate players to visualise the chords shapes across the fretboard. Today we’ll apply the same idea to scale shapes.
The CAGED system is a convenient way of thinking about chord and scale shapes. It makes it easy to link positions together and create larger scale patterns and alternative chord voicings.