The CAGED guitar system is a way to visualize and link the 5 ‘positional’ scale patterns (one for each chord shape) to span the fretboard.
Just because it’s called CAGED, doesn’t mean you’re trapped in a cage… UNLESS you only use one or two of the CAGED patterns. If you do that, it’s what’s called being stuck in the box. (It always puzzles me when guitarists don’t learn all 5 patterns. It’s like having only two fingers on your hands instead of five! You can’t do anywhere near as much because you’re handicapped. Except here, it’s self-imposed.)
If you learn these scale patterns, they will open up the fretboard for you and give you a lot more options for playing anywhere on the neck. And give you more options for being creative.
There’s certain things each CAGED pattern offers:- like different notes to do hammer-on’s and pull-off’s between, or, different sounding licks.
The 5 CAGED Scale Patterns…
The basic idea is that there are 5 basic, or ‘open’ chord shapes… C, A, G, E and D. See CAGED diagram below.
The general idea is that this gives you 5 different ways to play (and visualize) and attach a scale fingering pattern to that particular chord shape.
The following CAGED Guitar lessons will show you how to move each of these chord shapes along the neck to turn them all into ‘C’ chords.
Then we will attach the 5 ‘C’ major scale fingering patterns to each of these 5 CAGED chord shapes.
These five fingering patterns span the entire length of the fretboard.
