What to learn after the CAGED system

Okay, you’ve learned the CAGED system and it’s working well for you. Good! Glad to hear it! It’s a useful thing to have under your belt.

What now? What are some effective new concepts that you can put into practice, in order to extend your skills, knowledge and musical ability?

I have a few ideas for you today, based on my own 30+ years as a guitarist, and from talking to many of the world’s top players such as Steve Vai, Joe Bonamassa and Andy Timmons. I’ll pass on some golden nuggets of info for you to work into your own sound, style and practice regime.

Take these as jumping off points for your own guitar adventure!

Perhaps you’ve landed on this article and you’ve not tried the CAGED system yet? For those people, here’s a brief primer. Everyone else, jump onwards one chapter!

Put simply, the CAGED system is a map that shows you all of the places you can play a chord on your guitar. The system refers to the open chord shapes we all recognise and use to make the chords C, A, G, E and D. These are all major chords, and the purpose of this system is to recognise chunks of notes, and the fact that they are connected throughout the fingerboard.

Take the C major chord, for example. The chord of ‘C’ requires the notes C, E and G to be played together: that’s what makes a C. 

You play this in its usual open position chord arrangement, but then you go to the next shape in the CAGED system, which would be A, right? You need to play a C chord using that shape.

You locate where that shape makes a C chord and play that A chord voicing in the new position (so fret 3 on the A string, and fret 5 on the D,G, and B strings), so that you’re playing a C chord, using the shape of the open position A.

Do the same with the G shape, the E major shape (for C, it would be a barre chord at the 8th fret, basically) and finally the D. You’ve now used the chord shapes for C, A, G, E and D to make C chords in multiple places. Now you know where the C chord’s notes lie right up and down the fingerboard.

Each shape will share a note or more with the shape that follows it, making an unbroken chain on note clusters. Whenever it’s time to play a C chord - or simply play in the key of C - you now have a full fingerboard full of appropriate notes to use.

You repeat this for the key or context that you are using, and you’ll find that the fingerboard demystifies itself pretty quickly.

My first piece of advice is going to sound counterintuitive, but bear with me.

After getting to grips with the CAGED system, I believe it will do you the world of good to learn a few basic scales again. The Major and Minor scales will do fine, and the reason I want you to try this is because the CAGED system is great for getting your fingers going to the right places, but it’s not great for explaining why. What are you actually doing, outside of playing chord shapes in several places?

Learning scales will sort of sew these shapes together, providing lots of ‘aha!’ moments as you find how the scales work themselves into chords and vice versa. Everything is connected, and by understanding which notes of a scale live within certain chords - and which don’t - you’ll start to gain some real understanding of the language of music.

Click to View my article on Essential SCALES

This is a crucial one if you don’t want to sound like a rusty beginner. The CAGED system normally has players basically follow those five chord patterns without considering much in between. I’d like you to adhere to those shapes of course, but try to play two notes per string. This shifts you away from the immediate chord shape your brain focuses on, and into a purer field of possibility. You need to think about the next chunk of notes in advance, and consider where to land within that chunk in order to get the result you want.

It’s normal for guitarists to play two or more notes per string when they take a solo, so getting used to thinking about the guitar that way gets you away from slavishly leaning on those ‘enclosed’ chord shapes, and expands your mental connection from one chunk of notes to another chunk.

This also comes under the ‘learn scales’ tip, because if you know a scale up and down the fingerboard as opposed to across the strings in a little box, you’ll have a far better understanding of where the notes are landing, thanks to the CAGED system already putting them out for you to use.

This builds upon my previous points, but I want you to start thinking about the distance between one note and the next. We talk about that space in between two notes as an interval, and that’s when you begin to hear phrases like ‘half a step’ or a ‘whole tone’. In this context, a step is a tone - they are interchangeable terms - and so on a guitar, a half step is one frets’ worth, and a whole step (or whole tone) is two frets. 

The reason that intervals are important to know and understand is that they are not necessarily uniform. What I mean here is that F is one half-step up from E, but D is one whole step up from C. Twice as far! The intervals between notes aren’t always the same distance apart, as we’ve just seen, but those intervals will never change: F will always be a half-step up from E and so on. This is because not every note has a sharp or flat equivalent, but that’s beyond the scope of today’s tips, so don’t worry about that until later!

Scales, then, are made from notes separated by intervals. Understanding scales and intervals allows you to talk about 3rds, 5ths and so on, because those relate directly: a 3rd is the third note in the scale; the 5th is the fifth note in the scale, not of your guitar’s fingerboard.

The CAGED system uses open position major chord shapes as its main ‘ammunition’ as it were. But that’s hardly where chords - and indeed music itself - stops. Chords can be extended by adding more notes, and those notes tend to have a distinct colour or sound. The extension is referred to by those numbers I just mentioned in the intervals section.

I recommend checking out 9ths, 11ths and 13ths: look into what that means and how to attach them to your chords. Doing this alone will open your musical vocabulary extensively, and it’ll help expand your horizons beyond the CAGED system.

As guitarists, we have a very literal notion of chords. We start with the root note (tonality or tonic), decide whether it’s major or minor, then consider the possible extensions. Piano players have a habit they regularly use called chord inversions, and whilst we do sometimes see guitarists using inversions, we could all make a lot more use of them!

So what am I talking about here? I’ll give you an example: have you ever checked out a song’s chords and seen a D chord that also has you playing an F# (2nd fret of lowest string) alongside the normal open chord ‘triangle’ shape? Often just before a chord change to a G?

Well, that was an inversion, and it can happen in many ways. An inversion is basically playing a chord but having the notes in a different order, so that the root note (in my example there, it would be D) is not at the bottom of the chord. 

Again, we guitarists tend to look towards the bottom of a chord for its tonality, but that’s a pretty limited way of thinking. The CAGED system does promote that somewhat, since we tend to lead from the root when we are thinking of the shapes. That said, the CAGED system is handy for offering alternative note placement for chords too, so it’s less about abandoning that knowledge as much as it is about thinking about what makes the chord itself.

That triangle D chord? Slide that exact shape up 5 frets so that your fingers are on frets 7, 8 and 7, with no open note (they were initially on 2, 3 and 2). Now you have a G chord, but it’s an inversion of the G chord! The bottom note is now D, isn’t it? Still a G chord, because you have the notes you need (G is made up of G, D and B) to make that a ‘proper’ G, but they are in a different order. 

Lots of you will actually know a bunch of inversions already: now’s the time to turn that familiarity into knowledge!

Counterpoint is a fairly significant way of moving past the baby steps of guitar playing. It sounds fancy and complex, but it’s really not. Counterpoint is the idea of creating a second melody that fits alongside the main melody of a song or a part of music. Often, it’s a harmony line, but there are so many things you can do with counterpoint. You can be extremely adventurous or you can keep things tight and simple. 

It’s all about how you listen. Out of the blue, a great example of counterpoint is the harpsichord part in Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Can you hear how it is its own melody, quite apart from the piano chords or the main vocal? It’s secondary to the voice for sure, but it’s more than mere accompaniment. It is its own melodic part that works harmoniously. 

This is counterpoint, and you can find it everywhere. In Muse’s song Supermassive Black Hole, Matt Bellamy sings a lead vocal over the chorus, and there’s another completely different vocal melody sung underneath it. Works harmoniously, but it’s not a vocal harmony, if you see what I mean? It is its own part that can exist without the main vocal melody.

Counterpoint is a wonderful tool, and you can use your knowledge of notes via the CAGED system and all of today’s tips to be able to locate what you need to create your own amazing counterpoint parts in your songs.

Okay, how were those tips for you? Six fairly simple but completely worthwhile steps that you can take beyond the foundation of the CAGED system. Six little projects to work on that will develop your understanding, your skills and your accomplishments on the instrument.

Actually, I hope that they’ll just prove to be fun and interesting, because those are the only real reasons for doing anything on a guitar. Music theory shouldn’t be a chore, and it shouldn’t be boring. It should excite you into exploring more musical landscapes and relationships within the sound. If it doesn’t, no problem! Bookmark this page, give it a month or so, and come back to see how you feel about it! 

Enjoy yourself and play more guitar!