Lessons

The CAGED system in a nutshell: Take one of the common open chords and move it along the neck so that it becomes a different chord. That’s pretty much it!

That’s the short version but it still pretty much sums it up. This doesn’t mean it isn’t useful, just don’t forget its simplicity otherwise you, like many others, will forever be searching for a system that doesn’t exist. If you want to make use of the CAGED system then the best thing you can do is forget all about the word “system” and just swap it for the word “chords”. I’m not going to spend a lot of time telling you all about the marvels of the so-called system. I’m going to give a quick explanation of what it is and then jump straight into showing you some things you can do with it. Let’s get to it.

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Basic Chord Tone Solo

Playing around with these chord positions can be useful but it doesn’t have to be all about just strumming chords. We can use the same ideas to create melodic solos. We could just as easily choose one of the previous examples and play something similar using arpeggios, i.e., picking the notes one at a time, or better still, just pick notes out of the chord forms to create something that resembles more of a melodic solo. The following example shows this kind of idea.

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