This lesson will continue expanding on the CAGED system, showing its role in enhancing fretboard navigation. Before we delve deeper into the intervallic relationships between each chord shape, let's look at the movability of the five shapes. You'll soon see how the CAGED system opens up the fretboard, helping you play scales, arpeggios, and solos in any key.

As you learned in the previous lesson, the guitar is tuned to allow certain chords to be easily played in their open form. Once again, these are the five chords that spell out the acronym CAGED:

The limitation of the five open chords is that they only allow you to play C, A, G, E, D, and then the minor chords Am, Em, and Dm - we'll come back to minor chords in a few lessons. You can include suspended / diminished chords in that list, but my point is that you're limited.

What do you do if you need to play an C# major, for example? The CAGED solution is to employ what we call movable shapes, which includes barre chords and open chords. When you look a little deeper into how the CAGED chords are formed, we‘ll see that these five chord shapes connect together all over the fretboard.

By using a barring technique you have shapes that you can move anywhere on the fretboard because it doesn‘t include open strings anymore.

The C Shape

To move the C shape up the neck, you effectively create a barre chord by replacing the nut with your index finger and adjusting the remaining fingers.

The A Shape

The A shape will be familiar to you if you‘ve ever played a barre chord. You can move this A major up by simply freeing up my index finger and then barring the fret, which again, represents the nut.

The G Shape

To move the G shape up the neck, once again you create a barre chord. This can be challenging because the G shape is less commonly used as a barre chord due to its complexity, but by focussing on the D, G and B strings, it becomes much easier.

The E Shape

Ok...by now you get the idea! E is a movable shape that can be moved across the fretboard.

The D Shape

The final shape is the D shape and although you don't need to barre this shape, you place your index finger to represent the nut and it makes it transportable.

LESSON 1

In this first lesson we'll focus on learning on transposing C across the neck using the 5 shapes of the caged system.