JAM TRACKS
LEARNING ALL the chordal and melodic options on the fretboard is alifelong task, and the‘CAGED’system is agreat way of exploring the scales and chords.
The premise of CAGED is that there are five shapes that cover all the ways of playing achord. From there, we subdivide into Minor/7th/maj7th/9th and so on.
As well as the different chord shapes around the fretboard, there are, of course, scales, arpeggios and patterns that can link not only harmonically with different chord voicings, but geographically in the same general area of the fretboard. Here are three to get you started.
EXAMPLE 1 This slightly uncomfortable chord (use all four fingers) is shown here to demonstrate how, using the CAGED concept, we can create an E Major chord using a C Major ‘shape’. It does a nice job of encapsulating the E Major arpeggio that appears in Ex4. If we omit the open sixth string, this becomes movable, too.
EXAMPLE 2 This E Minor chord is familiar to most, using the A Minor shape up at the 7th fret. You’ll see all the notes in this chord (plus a few more) can be found in the shape 4 E Minor Pentatonic, which ‘lives’ in the same location. You could change the A Minor shape to a C Major shape and find aG Major arpeggio here, too.
EXAMPLE 3 Again, this shape is familiar: aGMajor barre chord using the E Major shape, the first finger functioning like a capo. This does
