![]() And, in turn, that scale position can be transposed across the neck, forming non-open-position scales, and while some of them don’t lend themselves easily to bar chords, you can generally bar these chord shapes as well. I guess, essentially I see “CAGED” as this - you have a series of open chords you can play in the first position, and each one of them, by filling in the spaces in the arpeggio that makes up the chord, can be thought of as an open position scale. Trying to write quickly here while brewing another pot of coffee in a work break, so I apologize if this is a little sparse. Some of this is extremely idiosyncratic, of course. I guess this is how I understand the CAGED system, and this is why, at the end of the day, I don’t find it terribly useful. Troy - like I said, it’s entirely possible I’ve just never gotten a good explanation of the “CAGED System” and you’re someone who I consider an incredibly thoughtful musician, so I appreciate your taking the time to weigh in here. I had no idea how to locate the notes of the next chord flavor / tonality in whatever spot I happened to be in. And if the chord changes, forget it, I was dead. I could play the E minor scale in all seven 3nps fingerings, but it was tons of memorization, and only resulted in any lick I knew sounding like a scale. ![]() TLDR you and probably everyone else are already “CAGED” players, and I really wish someone had showed me this when I was 15, when I all I knew was “scales covering the fretboard” but couldn’t improvise. So when we transcribed his licks, I actually named them that way, in terms of which shape they live near, because it seems clear that’s how he thinks. He said something like “I have certain positions I’m very comfortable with”, and then blasts out a few bebop licks that are all basically in the E-major barre chord area. In the case of Oz Noy he eventually said “i see the shapes” and in Olli Soikkeli’s case I eventually figured out that the word “position” is what he uses. ![]() It has been very hard to draw out the what they think about the fretboard in words since a lot of even really technical players like Oz Noy don’t seem to think about this explicitly, even though it appears to be what they’re doing. In the interviews we’ve done over the past few years, I’ve explicitly tried to get at this by asking players how they navigate the fretboard. I’d also point out that this idea of familiar shapes with licks loosely attached to them seems to be one of if not the only way the guitar is played in an improvisational sense. In fact, rather than move their vocabulary up the neck, grass players just capo and keep playing “open” C. In some sense that’s the most obvious form of CAGED there is, since they when they play the “C” shape, it really is a C chord, as opposed to just the C chord shape played somewhere else up the fretboard. Even if you never play the actual chord, you still know what area it exists in, thus you know exactly how to find the phrases.Įven bluegrass players, who live basically live in first position 90% of the time, have specific phrases for each open chord they play over. Knowing the chord type is how you quickly access phrases in the matching tonality without having to know note names or do “harmony math” in your head. Once you do that, learn chord progressions strung together where the licks connect, so that you can “play through the changes”. Now just do that for every chord and phrase type you know. You know how when you play the E-shape major barre chord, that’s also the location of the box position blues scale? So when yoy play the barre chord you can instantly jump into a blues lick in the same spot? That’s CAGED. The idea here is making it simpler for you to find on the fretboard the sounds you’ve previously conceptualized. The book is all about “control” over the fretboard, so it starts right away with exercises like: play all the possible intervals, in all possible pitchs, using different strings throughout so it makes you map all the simple intervals we often take for granted like octaves, fifths and fourhs but also the more “annoying” ones like minor and major seconds. If you don’t see value in that type of knowledge, I suggest a method called “The Advancing Guitarrist” by Mick Goodrick - maybe it’ll change your mind. Think of it as a mean for better chord previewing so you can play conceptualized sounds easier. This isn’t music theory, but it’s not a mechanical type of knowledge either. The CAGED system is meant for mapping all the possible triad voicings you can encounter on the fretboard - it’s a tool to increase control over the instrument. I’ve never run into an explanation of the “caged system” that has really sold me on it being of any value beyond just knowing a decent amount of music theory.
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