What do you think of the CAGED chords?

@fmmlp There is a great course available through Truefire on this. I had put together some of it myself, but this really opened my eyes to the relationships and possibilities:
https://truefire.com/techniques-guitar-lessons/guitar-lab-triads/c232?utm_source=tfsearch

It is worth every cent of full price, but if you wait a couple of weeks, it will probably be on sale for Christmas.

 

A "chord" means certain notes played at the same time. It doesn't mean "a certain arrangement of the fingers". A major triad is a major triad whether you play it on a harp, piano, or a telecaster even though you put your fingers in different positions to play it on each one. So getting back to caged, it's not like there's two kinds of chords - the chords we've always had for thousands of years and then Caged Chords™ some other, different chords. There's only normal chords. What there is is a remembering trick people use to memorize where the notes fall on a modern guitar fretboard and that memory technique is called caged.

If you asked "Do you picture the caged pattern when you play?" I'd think that's a pretty normal question, but "Do you use caged chords?"...I mean... how are you supposed to answer that? There's only one kind of chords, chords, and yes, I use them. Tell me what you think NOT using "caged chords" would look like?

 

Here's my view on CAGED.

It helps you to start working up the neck and is a great tool for beginners and intermediate players. As long as you are relating the chord shapes back to scale patterns too and not using it strictly for chords.

Now my gripe with it is that few teachers and fewer students expand on it and explore where the roots, fifths, thirds, sevenths and etc are. They use it as a pattern and base everything off this template. This causes issues suddenly when you're trying to actually build chords and their inversions from it. People tend to ether go back and build on their framework to make the CAGED concept work or they start all over with another method to start building.

Typically I think a single note method and transitioning to a chordal method is better because if you really learn the major scale, the scale from which we measure every other scale by, and learn where your scale degrees are in relation to the tonic, then you can build or modify the major scale to meet any sound requirements you may need. That doesn't mean it's an end all, be all method ether but I think CAGED and imagining all these shapes and shapes within shapes is too tedious to do in real time. I also believe the latter would work for 90% of musicians playing guitar.

But I may be an oddball where I think of individual notes and build upon those single notes if I desire or need in a situation.

 

I chose "What are you talking about" in the survey, not because I don't "use" CAGED, but because--this thread bears out my thinking--everyone means something different when they talk about it. We are like the proverbial busload of blind men examining the elephant.

The world cracked open for me when a student in my English class showed me a series of five interconnected major diatonic scale patterns that he'd learned from his guitar lessons. Later someone called it "CAGED".

No one's piped in yet to say it--some are probably tired of talking about it--so I'll say it for them: CAGED isn't a system. It's just the way the fretboard is in standard tuning. Whatever our understanding of it is, it is like a map, a way to find our way from one musical place to another.

Right now, with my own understanding of CAGED, I'm working on finding any chord I need (I, ii, iii, IV, etc.) within each of the scale patterns. They're all there, they have to be since each pattern contains a whole handful of 1-7 intervals from the tone note, plus all the flattened or sharpened scale notes you could want. Familiar chord shapes reoccur. Later I'll work on something else.

Many people on this forum (some even in this thread) understand the fretboard "system" much better than I ever will. I thank them all again for everything they've done to help me understand better.



P.S. While I'm blathering about all this, I'd like to give @Larry F a nod, and say that I'm also working on knowing the names of all the notes on the board, although for me it's an embarrassingly slow process. Same goes for scale notes and chord spellings.

 

CAGED truly is just a natural way that everything falls but it is a system too.

It's not a planned system as in when the instrument was first invented someone had intentionally done this. But the way we organize the CAGED concept makes it a system. If you fully explore the CAGED system, which it seems like you're doing, you'll see the underlying idea behind it. I think CAGED Method would probably be a better term to describe it but system makes it easier to understand the idea to the majority of people.

At the end of the day it's just a means to an end as with every other method. The concept is to organize and understand the fretboard in a way we can create and relate to music we want to make.

 

I think it's always been puzzling to me because I started out as a bass player, and by the time I got interested in guitar I was a jazzbo and I never really learned much facility with the "cowboy chords." Instead I'd sit down with The Real Book and figure out how to play a chord melody version of some standard, which means figuring out the various ways to articulate a chord and its melody notes in a given song. Like "what shape of Em7b5 gives me a high Bb in the melody." I learned the fretboard from playing bass in jazz bands and walking through changes, so I knew what notes went into what chord.

CAGED always seem like it's starting from the cowboy chords and IMHO the cowboy chords are actually a really bad place to start, because they make maximum doubled notes a feature, and it seems to me it's really important to unlearn that stupid cowboy Gmajor instead of straining to re-use that shape further up the fretboard

 

I'm still not seeing a "system" of chords here. Maybe the presentation is lacking, sorry.

For example: drop-2 chords have a specific formulation (independent of guitars -- pianists know them, too).

 

I kid you not... I was looking at some old scraps of paper recently, in my bin of half written songs, etc. Going back to the 70's and 80's...

I found a scribbled set of note and the word EDCAG written next to it!

I only heard of CAGED about 10 years ago (of course here on the TDPRI), but apparently I've been using it for quite some time!

FWIW, I don't think about CAGED, per se. I have tried to internalize scale/mode shapes all over the fret board, and I see the chord shapes in them. No doubt I could do a lot better job with it though.

About the only thing I know for sure is that every time I get an a-ha moment, it just opens the door to a whole bunch more stuff that I don't know (yet). I haven't ever had any formal music theory training, but I have picked up on a whole lot of it over the years. I understand a lot of it, but the harder part for me is putting into practice.

Cheers,
Doug

 

I would call this CAGED stuff chord inversions. Using your index finger for the nut and sliding up the fret board plays a role.

 

Yep. I had to go search and see what it was. It should be relabeled "common sense". But hey, it's good for early learning I think to have a name for it maybe...?

 

If it works for people, that’s cool.

I don’t understand how the “shapes” move “up the neck” in the order of CAGED. Are you picking an arbitrary “starting” point to make that happen?

I also don’t understand why picking 5 or 6 note chords as the foundation is supposed to be helpful?

Is the big insight just that chord forms are moveable?

Why not just start with triads. Which are actual chords? And the different inversions to put the root on different strings and fretboard positions?

Anyway, glad it’s helpful to some I guess. Seems cumbersome to learn that chords “are” 5-6 note things and then have to “unlearn” that to accept the more useful (to me) reality that chord are three notes.

But maybe I’m missing something.

 

Look up "Wayne Krantz" tutorials.