CAGED Guitar System: How To Make The Most Of It

The diagrams below show the seventh chords based on the CAGED system. These are the most common of the dominant seventh chords and like the Caged minor chord you should make sure you know these very well. Dominant seventh chords contain four notes and are the same as ordinary major chords but with a flat 7th added. We are only concerned with the fundamentals of the Caged method at the moment so we’ll avoid the technical details at this stage. What’s important is that you know where the flat seventh note is located within the chord shapes. Take some time to learn all of these chord patterns inside out. The green note in the diagrams indicates where the flat sevenths are.

Play around with these chord tones using the same idea outlined in the caged technique lesson. Don’t forget this stuff takes a while to sink in and until it does you will probably think it’s all very cheesy sounding and your ideas are limited. Making the most of this system is all about getting these kind of ideas embedded into your brain so well that you can play around with these notes on autopilot. It’s not until you get to that stage that things start to unfold and your solos come to life. Playing with backing tracks is important because it makes it interesting and you will learn a lot quicker. There’s nothing like hands on experience. Playing with backing tracks is like playing with a band which of course is the ultimate goal for guitar soloing.

Most teaching on the CAGED system focuses on major chords and scales. It’s pointless going to all that trouble learning a system and then only using a small percentage of it’s versatility. The whole point of making the most of a method like this is to get you learning the fretboard and visualising the notes in an efficient, usable manner, one that avoids the all too common method of thinking only in shapes and scale patterns. CAGED is just a term. As we progress through these lessons we want to start thinking less and less about C-A-G-E-D patterns and just start thinking about chords and chord tones.

Minor chords based on the open positions are less popular than their major counterparts because they are hard to use and require a more finger stretches, the worst being the G minor and C minor chord forms. Sure, it’s great if you can do them but it’s not that important for lead guitar. What’s more important is knowing where the notes are and being able to visualise the chord patterns. A lot of guitarists when learning stuff like this ten to think of a chord as needing to be played on all five or six strings. The thing to realise is all non seventh major and minor chords are Triads that just contain three notes. Getting used to these triad shapes is possibly more useful than thinking about chords that use all six strings.

The diagrams below show the minor chords in the CAGED system. Learn them and play around with them over jam tracks. The ones that are difficult, just break them up into smaller string groups.

In the next lesson we will learn how seventh chords are applied to the CAGED system and then we can move onto breaking these chord patterns down into smaller parts. Remember, creating creative and interesting solos relies on a command of the fretboard, the more options you have the better you are going to be. Once we have learnt all these patterns, all we need to do is understand how they are formed and then we can begin putting them to real world use by combining them with scales and starting to think about the notes in a solo instead of relying on scale patterns which lead to predictable guitar playing.

 Making your guitar solos sound professional

 The Caged system isn’t just about relating chord patterns to the major scale. In fact as far as I’m concerned it’s the least important. A good guitar solo is more often centred around chord tones rather than scales. Sure, scales are an important part of it but the difference between pro and amateur guitar lead breaks mostly boil down to three things. Amateur guitar solos are most often a combination of the following three things.

1. Poor guitar technique
2. Over use of scale patterns
3. Un-awareness of the importance of the underlying chords

The first one isn’t so hard to grasp, most beginner guitarists know their technique might need some work and they usually practice harder to improve it. The other two are a bit more difficult and they are a related problem. The beginner and even some intermediate guitarists aren’t necessarily bad at playing lead guitar, they just have limited knowledge of how to practice and improve their guitar solos to sound professional. This is one of the bigger problems of self taught guitarists, the books they use don’t really help much so it’s hardly a surprise.

Many magazines and guitar methods will tell you all about scales and maybe even explain the CAGED guitar system but unfortunately not in nearly enough detail as they should. The heart of the CAGED method is about knowing how to find chords as well as chord tones anywhere on the fretboard. This is more important than just relating five chord shapes to five major scale shapes.

Another problem with they common explanations of the CAGED system is that it is always related to major chords only. This is a mistake. Yes the five common chords make are the basis of the system but shouldn’t be limited to the five major chords (triads) only. It’s just as important and not even much more difficult to use this same method to know the minor chords and all the seventh variations.

It takes time to learn them all but the good news is it gets easier as you go on. At first it can sound like to much to learn but it really isn’t that bad. Once you get going there are so many similarities between the shapes that it comes together a lot quicker than you might expect at first. A few months regular, focused practice and it’s quite possible for most guitarists to have put the CAGED system to very good use for all the chord variations and anywhere on the guitar neck.

The best way to make use of this method is to simply start using it straight away, but do so in small stages so that you build your skill slowly. Try to do it all at once and you will probably get nowhere.

One of the first things you should practice is to play the chords to a variety of chord progressions but try to stay as close to one position on the guitar neck as possible. Learn this well and you will open up a whole new world with your guitar solos. Use the practicing ideas on this website to build your CAGED knowledge and your solos will improve by a huge amount. There will be quite a lot of practice ideas coming so watch out and start improving your guitar playing now.