{"id":1864,"date":"2020-04-06T12:04:42","date_gmt":"2020-04-06T12:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1864"},"modified":"2021-03-07T00:53:49","modified_gmt":"2021-03-07T00:53:49","slug":"caged-system-and-chord-tone-soloing-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/caged-system-and-chord-tone-soloing-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"CAGED System and Chord Tone Soloing – Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

Basic Chord Tone Solo<\/h4>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Chord<\/a><\/p>\n

Example Solo 1<\/strong><\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/simple-caged-solo-1.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n

It’s a bit simple sounding but that’s OK. This is how you should practice this stuff, it’s about the best thing you can do to learn your way around the fretboard. Find as many variations as you can and keep looking for new ideas until you can navigate your way between each chord form quickly and easily. These kinds of ideas form the basics of chord tone soloing.<\/p>\n

This chord progression is a simple I-IV-V in C major, it would also work very well with C major pentatonic scale or C major scale. You should experiment with all options and mix them up. For example you could play some of it using the C major pentatonic and some using the ideas above. With practice you can, if you wanted, play mostly with C major pentatonic and use the above ideas to target chord tones on the changes. This generally makes your solos sound a bit more interesting and strengthens the chord changes which makes you sound more like you know exactly what you are doing, as opposed to arbitrarily noodling around scale notes.<\/p>\n

Practice makes perfect<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fundamentals of using CAGED chords and chord tone soloing aren’t really that difficult to grasp. Putting it into real world practice is a little different, especially in songs with more chord changes or when trying to apply it to different musical keys. Even with a simple I-IV-V chord progression like used in the previous example, this can cover a whole lot of the fretboard if you wanted it to. Being able to find all of the chord forms quickly and easily looks simple on paper, but can be quite challenging in reality. When you first start out with all of this it would be quite normal to feel like your brain is having a meltdown and can’t possibly keep up, the song has already moved on to the next chord before you’ve figured out where your fingers should be.<\/p>\n

There’s no easy way out of this, you have to learn the chord forms, learn where the root notes are in each chord form and know how to find these notes quickly on the fretboard. You have to just keep practising over and over. Always start simple. You’ll get there quicker if you play along with jam tracks using fewer chords and reasonably moderate tempos. Expect this to take some time. I practice this stuff quite regularly, I’ve been playing guitar for 35+ years and I still stumble occasionally, especially if it’s in a key that I don’t play often.<\/p>\n

Many guitar solos will spend the majority of time using just the first three or four strings of the guitar. This is a good way to practice as it doesn’t bog your mind down with too much information at once. Also, it’s perfectly OK to not be 100% fluent. There will be thousands of permutations that you could use to map out the fretboard with just a few basic chords. You don’t need to nail the whole lot. Practice just a few ideas and concentrate only on getting good at those. You can do a whole lot of stuff with just the A, D, and E form chords on the first three or four strings. Learn these in major, minor and 7th form and with just this alone you’ll have a pretty decent grasp of the fretboard which will give you plenty of ideas over the majority of common chord progressions.<\/p>\n

What we’ll do now is take a look at a few diagrams of some minor and 7th chord forms with their intervals. Learn where the root notes are in each chord so that you can use them over various chord progressions. Your job is to learn as many chords as you can and learn the notes on the fretboard. It takes time so just stick with it. Your only goal is to be slightly better today than you were yesterday. Within a few months you’ll be surprised just how far this can take your guitar playing to another level. The diagrams below aren’t an exhaustive list but more than enough to get you going.<\/p>\n

\"Caged<\/p>\n

\"Caged<\/p>\n

\"Notes<\/p>\n

Chord Tone Solo 2<\/h4>\n

The following solo uses nothing but chord tones taken from the CAGED forms, played over a nice little Ukulele \/ Pop backing track with quite a few chord changes. It demonstrates how using nothing but chord tones can make a solo very melodic, especially where the chords change often. Even though I’ve created this as more of an example exercise, I think it still could work as a reasonably passable guitar solo with a few minor tweaks.<\/p>\n

Something like this will take a fair amount of practice, not because it’s difficult to play (unless you are a beginner) but just for keeping up with the chord changes. I probably spent about half an hour jamming along before even starting on this example, just to etch the chord changes into my mind first. In the next part of this series I’ll add some shorter loops and exercises that will help build up your fluency. For now though, let’s take a look at the solo TABs. The chord boxes over each bar show the notes used from each chord form.<\/p>\n

Play Example Solo 2<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/uke-caged-solo.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Caged<\/a><\/p>\n

There are a few places in this solo where the next chord is anticipated before the beat. For example, the last note in bar 4 over the A minor chord moves to the 4th fret on the G string. This is part of the G chord so it’s not shown in the Am chord diagram. Just worth mentioning in case it seems confusing. Obviously there are many ways you could approach this solo. In the next part we’ll take a look at some exercise examples that we can use to practise and get more fluent with using ideas like this.<\/p>\n

Backing track for solo 1<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/simple-pop-125-c.mp3<\/a><\/audio>
\n 
\nBacking track for solo 2<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/jam-tracks\/ukulele-pop-140-c.mp3<\/a><\/audio>
\n 
\nYou can download the chord solo TABs in PDF version here<\/a>.
\nDownload PDF<\/a><\/p>\n

The Ukulele jam track is also available in other keys here<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to: \u00a0  \u00a0Part 1<\/a>\u00a0 . . .<\/span> Part 2<\/span>\u00a0 . . .<\/span> Part 3<\/a> . . .<\/span> Part 4<\/a> . . . Part 5<\/a><\/h4>\n

Got a question or confused about something? Just leave a comment below.<\/p>\n

\"Guitar<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lessons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1864"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2545,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1864\/revisions\/2545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}