Find Major Chords all Over the Fret Board Easily – Intro to the CAGED System

Learning open major and minor chords is one of the first steps a beginner guitar player does. It’s the key to being able to play other peoples songs and writing a few of you’re own if you’re interested in that. Locating other versions of those same open major chords on the guitar neck is not as easy. Sure if you had a list you could work to memorize them, or if you knew every note on the neck you could probably piece those chords together as well. Of course both of those are a lot of work.

I want to show you an easy to understand system that makes finding different variations of the 7 major chords (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) a lot easier then either of those two alternatives. The system is called the CAGED guitar system. The name comes from the five major chord shapes we’re going to use in the system C-A-G-E-D.

So let’s get started.

Because of the natural make up of the guitar neck this easy to use system works at locating five different variations of all seven major chords as barre chords. When we play each of the major chords that make up the name C-A-G-E-D we’re playing a particular chord shape. If we take these same shapes and form barre chords at different frets on the neck then we can locate variations of all seven major chords.

EXAMPLE: Barre the 5th fret and play an A shape and you have a D major chord.

Of course there is still some practice and memorization to remembering in an instant where you can play and E chord in using a C shape. This system will make it a lot easier to discover where those chord shapes are.

There’s a brief video below that explains the CAGED guitar system and provides an example of using the D, C, A and G shape as barre chords on the 2nd, 4th, 7th and 9th frets to make an E chord. You can use this same process to find all of the other major chords on the guitar neck.

After you watch the video I suggest you grab your own guitar and play around not only with the example shown but also try finding some other chord variations using the CAGED system. You’ll be amazed just how easy it is to find all those chords on the guitar neck that might have seemed like a daunting task before.

Wanna learn more stuff about guitar like the CAGED system? Not interested in taking private guitar lessons? Why not try a learn guitar dvd course? Learn at your own pace from the comfort of your own home.