There seems to be a huge amount of confusion when it comes to the CAGED philosophy… both what it is, and what it isn’t.<\/p>\n
Since this is “Blues Guitar Unleashed” I’m going to talk about it from a blues perspective. But many of the points I’ll make here you can apply to other styles of music.<\/p>\n
Before I get too into this please understand that I didn’t learn CAGED until I had been playing a guitar for 20 years. And to the best of my knowledge the first person who used the term CAGED and really pioneered what people now call the CAGED system is Bill Edwards in his series “Fretboard Logic.”<\/p>\n
If you know of earlier uses of this, please let me know in the comments.<\/p>\n
I’ve gone through that book at a very cursory level… I have never studied it in depth only flipped through the pages for about half an hour. It didn’t make much sense to me how he connected a lot of things so I could not connect with it. You may have a different experience.<\/p>\n
So CAGED is basically this – there are only 5 major chord shapes on a guitar… C, A, G, E, and D.<\/p>\n
If you take a C chord and refinger it so that your first finger will barre the open strings, you can move it up to a C#, D, D#, and so on as long as you like.<\/p>\n
You can do the same thing with an “A shaped” chord. These are what we commonly know as root on the 5th string barre chords.<\/p>\n
The “E shaped” chords are what we commonly know as root on the 6th string major barre chords.<\/p>\n
There are some kind of cool connections that happen with this in that the C shape connects to the A shape which connects to the G shape which connects to the E shape which connects to the D shape which then connects back to the C shape.<\/p>\n
So you have these 5 chord shapes which all connect and you can put arpeggios and scales on top of them and have any arpeggio and any scale you want.<\/p>\n
But here’s the thing, you also have 5 pentatonic boxes. They have 5 notes instead of 3, connect in the same ways, and lay on top of the same chord shapes… plus they have the advantage that you probably already know them!<\/p>\n
The reality is that a guitar fretboard divides into about 5 pieces per octave. Whether you choose to look at those pieces as chord shapes with 3 notes or pentatonic boxes with 5 is totally up to you and really doesn’t matter much. You can put the CAGED chords on top of the pentatonic boxes just as easily as you can put the pentatonic boxes on top of the chords.<\/p>\n
And for blues, in which we tend to use the minor pentatonic\/blues sound more than the major sound, CAGED falls apart just a little because the C and G shapes are not playable when they become minor.<\/p>\n
When I do a blues solo, do I used CAGED? Rarely.<\/p>\n
When guys like BB King or SRV play a solo, do they use CAGED? Not that I’ve ever seen and I’ve transcribed hundreds of solos from artists like those.<\/p>\n
Do you need to learn CAGED to play like those guys? No.<\/p>\n
The exception to the rule for me is Hendrix. Playing in the “Little Wing” or “Axis:Bold As Love” style with his cool chord embellishments is a style of playing that goes well with CAGED chords…. but ONLY once you know how to put the chord shapes and the pentatonic boxes together.<\/p>\n
Which… again… you can do in any order you choose.<\/p>\n