Want to learn the CAGED System on guitar? Start Here! - CAGED System for beginners - Guitar Lesson

all right so this is going to be a comprehensive guide to the cage system and i'm making this course uh as really a prerequisite to all the videos that i do every week at active melody because i'm always referring to this and i thought it would be good to put this out there for every anybody that maybe you don't know what the cage system is or you don't really understand how to how to use it or how it works that's what this little mini course is it's just a really uh thorough explanation of what caged is caged by the way is not an acronym for anything it's just five chord shapes the c chord a chord g e and d that's where caged comes from and i'm talking about first position chords the chords we learned down here those first chords you learn to play when i first started playing guitar i would i was i learned those chords but then i would watch somebody play and they'd be playing chords all over the neck or they'd be soloing all over the neck and i'm always thinking like how do you do that everything i knew was down here and the first three frets and i didn't know how to translate any of that to the rest of the neck that's all caged is it's just a logical grouping of these different sections of the neck so that when we're playing up here we're playing in a certain neighborhood and you need to be able to understand that so as i go through these lessons that i do every week and i talk about the a shape or the e shape it's all coming from this this material so the first thing that i'm going to assume you know how to do as a little prerequisite to this course is know those five chord shapes i'm talking about the c chord the a chord the g chord the e and the d so hopefully you know how to play those chord shapes i'll put the put the tab up on the screen if you need um need to that but i'm i'm going to assume you know how to make those chords so that's the first a little bit that you need to know once you know that you've kind of got the road map to be able to do the rest of this now there's five chord shapes as we just discussed but there's two main ones and we're going to start with the two main ones the other three are kind of extra you need to know all five but it's i think you can get by with a lot just knowing these first uh two that we're gonna learn in fact when i played i played for years in a band and all i knew were these two shapes nobody ever explained cage to me this wasn't anything that somebody sat down was until years later really until the internet um you know i started watching videos on youtube probably until youtube that i understand oh i was actually playing uh you know i was using the cage system and didn't realize it okay so we're gonna take a look at we're going to start with the first shape which is going to be our e shape so we're starting with the e first and uh if i play an e chord the way that we all know how to play it down here in first position we call first position this area first three frets or so that's first position um that's an e chord now if i wanted to play an f chord i should just be able to slide that up right so e and think of a piano what's the next key on the piano there is no black key between the e and the f so you go e and then you go up one it's an f so i should just go like this right well that's not really an f i mean it's kind of an f there's a little bit of a an f that's an f but then you've got these open strings and this is the open string thing is the dilemma that we have as fred and instrument players guitar players is because when you move from this shape up to here you've still got the open strings that were ringing out from your e chord so think of it that way when you're playing an e chord like this you've actually got one two three strings that are just open that are not fretted at all but they kind of are fretted they're just threaded with the nut the nut is this piece right here at the the head of the guitar so if i play my e chord and i use different fingerings so i've got my middle finger ring finger pinky i can slide them up and then i've got my index finger free to bar and all i did was replace where the nut is so you can see logically what's going on there we just took this shape and we slid it up and if i bar so now i'm playing this note this note and this note right which were the open notes before now i've got an f chord but i'm i've got an f chord using the e shape that's really the the logic behind it now here's the part that i left out in that previous video and this is this is critical um how do you know that's an f chord well this comes in down to connecting the chord itself to strings to the string names and so we're going to start off uh you you really need to know the names of the notes on your sixth string which is your low e string and your fifth string those are the you need to when you're starting to memorize the entire fretboard start there start by learning the six string notes and the fifth string notes because when you learn the sixth string you've actually learned the first string as well because they're the same they're just two octaves apart but it's the same note that's an e and that's an e so you're going to have to do your homework on that but i will put up on the screen where you can learn how to do that i have done that i've covered that in a previous lesson all right so then the way this works with this e chord shape that we're using here is whatever the note is on the sixth string whatever that note is that's where your bar goes and that's the name of the chord so if i'm playing third fret sixth string and i'm playing that with my bar so i've got my bar down here's my e shape right and there's my bar that's a g note therefore that's a g chord now i'm still using that e shape but we don't say e anymore that's irrelevant now it's just the positioning of the fingers now everything that i'm doing is a g so if i play here i know that's an a note therefore that's an a chord now so far with cage we're only talking about major chords we're not talking about minors or sevens or major seven or any of that we're just talking about major chords we can translate it to other chord shapes but in the beginning you just want to be able to play your major chords all of them so g sharp you need to be able to play a b flat you need to be able to play any of your major chords that don't have like a an extension or anything to to change that so that's the first rule is if you're playing the e shape whatever the note is on your sixth string that's how you find the chord so now if i said to you and you can pause the video and work this out if i said play a b chord using that e shape you should you've got all the information you should be able to do it here spoiler alert what you would do then is you'd find your b note on the sixth string which is here and then you bar and there's your b chord using the e shape okay so so far so good now let's move on to the a chord shape that's the second most important so i think that these first two if you get that e shape and the a shape you've got a lot of territory already covered in terms of being able to play all over the neck so the a shape we look at our a in first position um there's two different ways i see this played the way that you can play it if you want to play five strings all five strings is like this where i've got all three fingers crammed into the second fret strings two three and four and that allows that open one string to ring out open string so now we're back to the open string thing which is you know what we were dealing with with the e chord and you've also got the open fifth string these middle strings however are behind the fret so the same principle applies them if i want if that's an a and i wanted to play an a sharp because it's the next step up and by the way you can bar this with either your ring finger or your pinky when we get into this next chord shape i use my pinky but if i wanted to play an a sharp i just take that shape and i slide it up but then i put my index finger where the nut was because remember we've got to take that and move it up and so now i've got that which would be an a sharp or a b flat so i've got my index finger on the first fret and then i've got the little bar here this little triad triad is just a three note chord so i've got that right there and so that's an a sharp or b flat if i go up one more that's a b and what's defining it how do i know it's a b well remember when we were playing the e shape it's whatever the note name was on our sixth string if we're playing the a shape however it's the note name from your fifth string where your index finger is same kind of thing when we played with our e shape it was where our index finger was same is true with the a shape but this time it's on the fifth string so this note fifth uh string second fret that's a b note therefore when i'm playing this using the a shape i'm playing a b chord so some of you if you're new to this you're already like whoa hold on that's a ton of information if you think about the variables we've got two variables to be able to play all over the neck so i can play a b like this or i can play b like this so that's a b chord using the e shape this is a b chord using the a shape and remember the thing that allowed me to know the name of this chord was where my index finger was on the fifth string for the a shape and where my index finger was on the sixth string for the e shape and so even if we get nothing else if you just get this far with caged you can play a blues or a country anywhere on the neck so just as a quick example if i wanted to play a one four five that's what we call it like a country or blues uh in the key of g for example the way that you would do it in first position you'd go like this g c d right real strummy but you got all these open strings ringing out what if we were to play that using this uh this new system that we've got so let's play a g chord using the e shape so our c chord would be up here because we're going to find the remember we've got to find the the note on the sixth string and then you can always go this direction two frets to get to your v chord that's just a little tip for you or you can just know that that's the d chord that we're looking for so we have d g now that's a lot of jumping around right it works though nothing wrong with it it's technically correct but let's take advantage of these neighborhoods that we can create now with our new chord shapes so we can play a g chord here using the e shape i can play the c chord using the a shape right here i'm thinking about neighborhoods now and when i talk about neighborhoods i'm talking about where is my nearest neighbor if that's my g okay then the next chord is a c chord where's the closest c chord to where i'm at oh yeah there's one right here and this is stuff you just learn over time so you've got your g your c using the a shape and then remember what i said you move up two frets to get to your five chords there's your d so there's your c and there's your d just like before there's your c and there's your d so now i've got one four five [Music] and there's no open strings with that so what that means now is i can play i've got my strumming can be a lot more precise i don't have open strings to wring out [Music] so i can do things like that but it also means i can easily change keys if we're playing a country song in the key of g g and somebody said oh that's too low let's go up a half step and play it in g sharp well if you're just down in first position you're you're in trouble you're gonna have to get out of capo or something but you don't have to worry about that if you know the cage system no problem i just find my g sharp uh using the uh the same system we talked about so it would be your you know on your sixth string if you're using this e shape g there's my you go up to the a chord shape so that would be my c sharp and there's my d sharp so it's right there now you can see that what if we go back to g here you can see that when i'm playing the 145 starting on the e shape it makes a little l shape here now i've got another lesson i'm going to put that up on the screen that goes through these two l patterns and that lesson is going to make perfect sense now that you understand this logic you're going to understand where that comes from but it allows you to quickly find a 145 you can play blues or rock or whatever using the same little uh system that we've got so i started in that example using the e shape i could start playing i could we could take the same three chords g c and d but i could start with the a shape so now i have to find remember you have to ask yourself if we're going to use the a shape where is the g note on the fifth string so i know it's up here on the tenth fret so that means i play my a chord shape there that's my one or my g chord and then where is my four chord where's my c chord using the e shape well i know that that's my c note on the sixth string remember when you you're playing the e shape it's where your index finger would be on the sixth string so there's my four you go up two frets there's your five so now [Music] one four five all in the same neighborhood here and that's important because you're not jumping around i don't even have to look at my hands i can just feel my way around when i'm playing that alright so let's add a few more variables to that so that's two out of the five shapes um and so the next one we're going to learn is the c shape i think it's probably the next most useful or most important these are just my opinions but if we take the c chord down in first position same principles apply now let's change our fingering so you're going to play with your middle finger ring finger and pinky that's kind of hard to do but it frees your index finger up so that you can slide it up and you can bar with your index finger now the good news is you only have to bar the first three strings with your index finger to play this shape and so that's how you play the c shape um in you know by re repositioning it now remember you're not playing all five or all six strings you're only playing the top five five four three two and one but how do i know what the name of this chord is how do i know what chord i'm using in this case we're going to still use the fifth string and it's where our pinky is so if i'm playing uh let's let's play here for example where my pinky is which is the uh seventh fret fifth string this note is an e note right it's an e so that means that this is an e chord there's also an e note in this chord uh where my middle finger is so where my middle finger is and where my pinky is those are the same note that's an e that's an e that is my e chord and i'm showing you in two positions so that you got two anchor points that you can use uh to visualize this and so this is the conventional way of playing the c-shape but that's not the way that i usually play it and actually i see a lot of people not using that because that's kind of awkward uh when you're playing especially if you're standing up it's kind of an awkward angle to try and get your pinky in most people play this shape like this just the top four strings that's enough of the chord that you need in fact with that you can go you can hammer on and get the keith richards there um so that's what's going on now if i'm playing this way without using my pinky remember i have to it's wherever my middle finger is it's that note that's the name of the chord so that's an e note now that's on the second string uh so that's where that would be the next string you'd want to memorize if you've got your fifth and your uh six strings memorized now you've got your you need to know your second string but that's that tells me the name of the chord if i'm using just this little shape here so that's the c shape so let's move on to the g shape now the nice thing about the g shape is it's basically the same as the a shape they share the same little triad it's going to make sense as we get into it let's look at a g chord in first position that's how you learn to play it right well look at what's going on look at first of all look at all the open strings there 4 3 and 2 are open then you've got this guy here on the third fret same one on the third fret sixth string so those are both g notes and then you've got one here which is the second fret that's a g chord in first position now that's a really hard chord shape to try and make like using all six strings using this cage system nobody ever does that nobody plays it that way here's how people do use it though they take this they take it and they split it into two parts so instead of thinking about the g shape like this which is not very practical this would be a b chord using the g shape i'll explain why in a minute but the way that you want to do it is you want to think of it like this you've got that which is easy to play just a bar here on the fourth fret and then i've got my pinky on the seventh fret that's a b chord uh this way the other way is like this so i've got that same bar but then i've got my in this case for this b chord i've got my ring finger on the sixth fret fifth string that's a lot a lot more practical that i can grab easily this i can grab easily this i cannot grab very easily and it would and it's kind of uh redundant a lot of redundant notes anyway so how do i know that's a b chord well when i'm playing this shape where my pinky is that's a b note it's on that first string remember the first string is the same as your sixth string so if you've got that sixth string memorized you've got your first string so that's one way to think about it the other way is uh let's look at a b chord using the a shape that's that was the second shape we learned there's a b chord using the a shape look at where my bar is my pinky is there i can replace that and i'm playing the g shape now i'm just playing those same three notes that i played with the a shape so that gives me like another anchor kind of you start to connect this stuff you go okay i'm playing playing this chord shape and i've got this little extension you can think of it that way or you can just play the uh the little uh the triad there and then watch this then i just went to the four chord whoa mind blown what did i do i went from that shape to the c shape using it the way that i showed you like the shorter the easier way the more practical one so now it's starting to maybe gel in your head a little a little bit even if you don't fully understand everything like oh okay the other way that you can use this g shape is this way i see this news all the time another good example of that would be when cries marry by hendricks so he plays like it's just the a shape right and then he goes like this and then he goes into the g shape see it's the same same triad for both of them but he changed that bass note you can also know the name of the chord from this triad but whatever that third string is so in that case that's a c note just like that's a c note just like that's a c note so that's another little anchor point you can start to learn these things but in the beginning just try and get your your e shape and your a shape based on the fifth and sixth string that's a really good starting point so that's how the g chord shape works one other thing i should mention about the a shape i didn't say this but the a shape when we when i was showing you that like a c chord using the a shape there's actually kind of two parts to it i think of this is like the bottom part and then this is the top part and if you think back to your a chord down here it's the same thing you can see where that's coming from but this is that top part of that a chord shape and that's a little triad that's very used it's used quite a bit and if you wanted to play this triad and needed to know the name of that chord it's whatever that third string is again which we just talked about same with this triad here right it's the third string that defines the name of the chord that's a c note therefore that's a c triad that same note is a c note so therefore that's that's a triad so that's uh another way of looking at that a chord shapes the top part of the a shape uh so you can think of the g chord as having the g chord uh top part and then the g chord bottom part that's how i think of it and then same for the a all right so thus far we've learned the c shape the a shape the g the e shape we've got one more which is the d shape and the d shape um you can imagine your d chord in first position if we're just playing that triad just the top three strings like that all you really need to know is the note name on your second string that's your d note that's your d chord therefore if i slide that up two frets that's my e note that's my e chord that's an f that's my f chord and so that's a real practical that's probably the most uh practical use case of that d chord shape the other way that i see it um used is to play the bottom part of that so let's take a g chord for example and let's look at playing a g chord using the e shape here we're going to start with that and then if i play the g chord using the d shape that would be up here because this note second string is that's an e or a g note rather now what i would have to do if i wanted to play the full chord is i'd have to play it like this so i'm i've changed the fingerings here i've got my pinky ring finger middle finger making that d shape but then i've got to come up here and bar strings five and four on the fifth fret so that would be another way of thinking about playing that g chord using the d shape now that's a really difficult thing and you wouldn't really do that that just doesn't make sense but what you would do well what you might do rather is play it like this so what i'm doing there is i'm taking the bar there on the fifth fret just playing strings five and four and then all i'm doing here is i'm playing strings uh three and two i'm not playing that that one string i'm just playing those middle five strings it's more like a d5 it's more like a d power chord but it allows you to do things like [Music] kind of a country rock thing that you might hear when you when i talk about a power chord it means it's just eliminating the third interval so there's no third there it's neither major nor minor it's just like a punchy power chord and that sounds good with a lot of overdrive so that's a d chord i'm sorry that's a g chord using the d shape a connection point for this would be well as i mentioned uh the way that we can define what that is is where my pinky is that second string that's a g note therefore that's a g chord same is true on the fourth string where my index finger is that is a that's also a g note therefore that's a g chord if you want to connect this to another chord shape though look at those two strings strings five and four which are on that fifth fret we've used these before when we play the e shape look at this there's those same two notes so we can we can connect this shape to your e shape that's just another little connect i'm trying to make all the little connection points i can think of and i go through that more thoroughly in that part two video it's really con that whole video is all about connecting them it's like legos from one to the next but i wanted to start with this video so that you can at least understand how to find these different shapes just on their own without having to connect them to anything so you should be able to if i were to quiz you and say i want you to play a d chord using the c shape you should be able to do that now you should be able to pause this video and play a d chord using the c shape remember if we're playing the c shape if we're doing the proper way with with all five strings you put your pinky on the fifth string and you find that d note on your fifth string so i know it's there that way that therefore that's my d chord using the c shape and if i look at that for a minute and go d chord oh yeah when i play d4 like this like the cowboy chord it's there it's in there this is just a little more full version of that it's adding a little extra color to it but that same triad is still there so quiz yourself on that try and find using all five of those shapes now find an a chord a g chord an e chord an f chord just try and find those chords using all five shapes it's going to be clunky at first and it may not even be very easy to fret them but what the the point of this isn't necessarily a technical thing so much as it is an understanding thing you have to just be able to understand what i'm talking about so going forward when i reference things which i do all the time and all the lessons at some point i'll say okay i'm playing an a shape but i'm playing a c chord you'll know what i'm talking about that's going to make more sense to you and once you can see that as being a c chord and that is being a c chord and this as being a c chord and this is being a c chord and you can see when i when we say c chord you see the whole fretboard lights up you have all these options what you can do with that then is when you're playing a lead let's say you're playing in the pentatonix good old c major pentatonic i can see all of those c chords now that i just showed you and i can use those as notes to land on or to just highlight as arpeggios [Music] right and i can work those into my leads that way that's just one way to do it we can also connect all of our scales major scale any scale you can you can link them back to these chord shapes so i want to conclude this video right here just giving you the overview of the cage system how you find these chord shapes i recommend you move on to the next video now how to link them all up and then there's some practice material which is really good for for being able to play them which it has a jam track and everything so that you can practice playing these chord shapes in different spots

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 928,173

Keywords: the caged system, caged system, caged system guitar, guitar caged system, caged system easy, caged system beginners, beginner caged lesson, caged guitar lesson, easy guitar lesson, understanding guitar neck, understanding guitar fretboard, guitar fretboard lesson, guitar lesson, guitar tutorial, music education, guitar education, activemelody, active melody, brian sherrill

Id: tN20eQaxjyE

Length: 28min 29sec (1709 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 09 2022