Playing The CAGED System On The Guitar.

Want to know a simple way to play the CAGED system on the guitar. Here’s how you should think of it when playing. When you combine the CAGED system with knowledge of notes on the fretboard (as I’ve said before, start on the E and A strings and learn the notes as these will predominantly tie into the root notes you’ll target with the CAGED system) and knowledge of scales, you’ll see how all these elements tie together.

As Paul Davids explains in the video below, the CAGED system helps with targeting notes on the fretboard when soloing, and developing your chord playing – his example of Snow by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers using the C shaped barre chords is a great example of a guitarist like John Frusciante from the RHCP using different chord voicings to great effect. If you want to explore more interesting chord shapes that utilise the CAGED system, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers material is a good place to start – Under the bridge is a great song to learn as the intro uses some great chord shapes tied together with melody lines. It’s a simple intro musically, but challenging to play cleanly.

My biggest challenge when looking at CAGED was looking at it in isolation. Once I looked at how the shapes worked within songs like the ones above, and started applying them to things like pentatonic scales across the neck, it really helped develop my knowledge of the fretboard.