The CAGED system

[rick-slo]

Outside of pure scale passages I am mostly in the chord melody camp. Various chord shapes with the melody line changing over the chord's harmony notes which can be done arpeggio or more blocked style. Probably more triad or quadrad note fingering use when playing a fair way up the neck for both sound and playability factors. Things done do vary somewhat from tune to tune.

[lar]

If you watch this Youtube video on CAGED 3 times, it will take you almost 5 hours.

I haven't watched it yet but it looks thorough:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nph...&index=2&t=26s

[Jwills57]

I disagree somewhat that CAGED is just memorizing a bunch of boxes and scale shapes. I mean, that's a starting point, but I think as guitarists we should, eventually, want to know what we are playing and why. No matter what "system" one is using, the start is usually learning chords and scale shapes, without actually too much understanding of the big picture. You know--this scale goes with these chords, so learn these chords and this scale. CAGED, I think, can help one not only with the "play this" part, but also with the "what" and the "why" part. I teach guitar. One thing that has become evident to me over the years is that beginners want to be able to play something right away, to make music right away; they're not really happy to slog through a MelBay book on beginning guitar. So we start with the A minor chord and the A minor pentatonic scale and work from there. When I show them that if you move the A minor triad up two frets and the A minor pentatonic scale up two frets, you are now playing in B minor, that's the CAGED system and lightbulbs start to come on.

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by Jwills57

I disagree somewhat that CAGED is just memorizing a bunch of boxes and scale shapes. I mean, that's a starting point, but I think as guitarists we should, eventually, want to know what we are playing and why. No matter what "system" one is using, the start is usually learning chords and scale shapes, without actually too much understanding of the big picture. You know--this scale goes with these chords, so learn these chords and this scale. CAGED, I think, can help one not only with the "play this" part, but also with the "what" and the "why" part. I teach guitar. One thing that has become evident to me over the years is that beginners want to be able to play something right away, to make music right away; they're not really happy to slog through a MelBay book on beginning guitar. So we start with the A minor chord and the A minor pentatonic scale and work from there. When I show them that if you move the A minor triad up two frets and the A minor pentatonic scale up two frets, you are now playing in B minor, that's the CAGED system and lightbulbs start to come on.

What you're describing seems more useful, and easier to "get" to me than CAGED. Of course, people should learn that they can play moveable chords and shapes, and that an Am moved up 2 frets is Bm. Everyone has a different way of learning, so multiple approaches are good. It's been too long for me to really recall how I learned that sort of thing, but to me, learning, as you describe, that you can take an E chord, move it up 1 fret and get an F, move it two more and get a G, and play the corresponding scales around the chord is easier to grasp than the CAGED thing, of "start with a C shape, then play an A shape at the 3rd fret to still get a C, then play a G shape at the 5th fret to still get a C", and so on. Nothing wrong with it, nifty insight. Just seems to me that it delivers less magic than is promised by all the hype CAGED gets. It's just one path thru understanding the geometry of the fretboard, and it seems to cause a bit of confusion.

[AugustWest72]

2 hour masterclass in CAGED system including riffs, solos and chords.

From Stitchmethod:

https://youtu.be/wvMHIXjruoU

[tbeltrans]

Reading through this and similar threads, I think part of the problem/confusion some a referring to is that for some reason, guitar players often seem to skip all the foundational work that players of other instruments routinely get. All the basic theory, learning scales, how to form chords, etc. is missing from the DIY "curriculum" and then instead we spend more effort in the long run trying to figure out what we are missing.

Maybe one solution might be to build a solid foundation in how music works and then jhow to apply that to our instrument might suffice instead of dancing around all that with various "systems".

Tony

[Acousticado]

After 45 years of playing, I don’t pretend to be at all knowledgeable in these concepts, mainly just winging it. It’s worked for the classic folk/rock and originals I tend to play alone at home, but I’ve realized that I’m far overdue to pay attention to and learn the range of approaches discussed in this thread. Thanks to all for your contributions.

How I see it being most valuable for me is when occasionally playing with others where I’ve always had difficulty improvising in a way that adds “character” to complement the song rather than a sameness, and knowing the options of where to quickly move around up and down the fretboard. A simple example is when a player is singing and strumming in open chords, I want to be able to fluidly find complementary full or partial chords, perhaps with a tasteful picking pattern. Doing so can add so much to a song.

[tbeltrans]

A perception (I think) about learning the foundational theory is that it is often taught on its own rather than as being directly applicable to anything we would need to use it for.

There are resources that teach these foundational concepts as directly applied to guitar. One such author is a guy Desi Sarna, who applies each piece of information directly to tunes we know by artists we heard all the time growing up, making it directly relevant.

https://www.guitarmusictheory.com/

One other thing to consider is what Robert Conti says in his jazz guitar instructions. He says that the important thing is to PLAY our instruments and then it becomes much easier to understand the theory once we are playing the material that the theory helps us understand, as well as that study being much more directly applicable to what we already know and do on the guitar. For this reason, I don't believe that adults are at a disadvantage compared to kids learning this stuff.

Applying that concept to us here in this forum who have been playing a long time, we already have a lot of playing under our respective belts, so learning the foundational stuff after the fact can actually make it easier to get into.

There are certainly many players who never ask the kinds of questions being asked in this and similar threads. They can probably play quite well in the style(s) that interest them without needing to learn the foundational stuff.

My comments are intended to be for those who are asking about various systems and how they work. I simply feel, after having been through that before just knuckling down and learning the foundational stuff that such systems try to shortcut, that just going through the foundational stuff makes such systems unnecessary.

Tony

[Joscefi78]

CAGED is an awesome and simple way to learn the fingerboard.

[Jwills57]

Hey, Doug--You mentioned something really insightful in response to my post, that I'm just now getting back to. When I get a student, I want to try to learn two things as quickly as I can. The first is, what are the goals? This is usually pretty easy to figure out. The second is, how does this person learn? This is the key point to which you alluded. From my experience, there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to learning guitar. I look at CAGED and any other "system" for that matter as the beginning and not the end of guitar wisdom. What's sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander, to turn an old saying on its head.

[Doug Young]

Originally Posted by Jwills57

Hey, Doug--You mentioned something really insightful in response to my post, that I'm just now getting back to. When I get a student, I want to try to learn two things as quickly as I can. The first is, what are the goals? This is usually pretty easy to figure out. The second is, how does this person learn? This is the key point to which you alluded. From my experience, there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to learning guitar. I look at CAGED and any other "system" for that matter as the beginning and not the end of guitar wisdom. What's sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander, to turn an old saying on its head.

All sounds right to me. My only concern about CAGED is that it sounds more magical than it is, and you get people like the OP saying "I don't get it, what's it good for?". If they'd done the letters the other order, DEGAC, no one would even notice it :-) Never underestimate the appeal of a catching acronym! But learning the fretboard is good, learning about moveable chords and scale patterns is good, so if thinking of it as CAGED helps someone, great. I tend to agree with whoever posted about other instruments not thinking like this. Guitar is a pretty visual/geometrical instrument, but I think over-reliance on patterns without understanding the music hinders us somewhat compared to those who learn other instruments.

I explained CAGED in my Mel Bay DADGAD book, and showed how the same concept can be applied even in alternate tunings. If I had it to do over, that's the one section I'd drop, it's just feels contrived, and I think I could have explained what I was trying to convey more clearly without the acronym.

[rick-slo]

IMO the best thing is to play actual pieces of music and work on the technique those pieces require to be able to play them well.
Develop a good ear by just listening to music and you can pick up more quickly on what is going on structurally and hopefully
play with more feeling. CAGED on its own does not take you very far.

[Brent Hutto]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

IMO the best thing is to play actual pieces of music and work on the technique those pieces require to be able to play them well.
Develop a good ear by just listening to music and you can pick up more quickly on what is going on structurally and hopefully
play with more feeling. CAGED on its own does not take you very far.

I'm a relative beginner compared to most of those posting on this thread but FWIW I totally agree. As we learn tunes that are meaningful to us, we accumulate knowledge in a more organic way than just setting out to master a bunch of checklist items in hopes that somewhere down the road we can incorporate them into our music.

And ear training is the key to bringing everything together and becoming a musician. That's the one thing that can't be emphasized enough IMO.

[tbeltrans]

Just to be clear, learning tunes and learning the foundational information don't need to be mutually exclusive (i.e. instead of "this OR that" thinking, try "this AND that" thinking).

As David Sudnow used to say in his piano course, "learn everything in the context of the song". In short, understand what you are doing as you are doing it. Knowing how music is put together can make the learning process easier.

As an example, learning a tune by ear off of a recording, knowing basic diatonic theory gives you the set of chords to typically expect (example: I ii iii IV V7 vi viib5 as the harmonized major scale). This helps to minimize the "hunt and peck" approach. Knowing the "three chord trick" (i.e. I IV V) as the most used chords in pop music, helps this effort even further. This is simple, common stuff. No magic. You will eventually learn this by learning hundreds of tunes, but why not shorten the path by learning these things as you learn tunes?

I would be surprised if anybody in this thread were to suggest wait to learn tunes until you have learned the theory behind the tunes.

Edit: Maybe this will help... I don't know what comes to mind for folks around here when they hear or read the term "music theory", but for me it is very simple. If I can readily use it in the music I play, then it is useful. To me, the music theory that I find useful can be explained easily in less than a half hour or written on a single sheet of paper. There really isn't much to it at all. Maybe some think of spending months in a classroom sweating over some big textbook. For me, it is simply the chromatic scale (the set of all notes used in typical Western music), the major scales derived from that, and the chords built on that major scale. Then, there are the three forms of minor scale, though the most important is the natural (relative) minor scale which simply starts on the 6th note of the major scale and has the same key signature. Fill in just a bit in between, and there you have it. This thread is much more involved than any theory a player would want or need to help make the effort of figuring out and understanding the tunes s/he is playing that much easier. In other words, in the time it takes to read through this thread, a person could have ingested all the theory s/he would need. It really is a small and simple thing that we blow up all out of proportion.

Tony

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by tbeltrans

I would be surprised if anybody in this thread were to suggest wait to learn tunes until you have learned the theory behind the tunes.
Tony

I wouldn't. That opinion is partially base on years reading posts on the forum and progress being or not being made. Whatever approach try to keep it fun and not to over mysterize things.