Guitar Mastery Simplified: How Anyone Can Quickly Become a Strumming, Chords, and Lead Guitar Ninja (15 page)

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The CAGED system
is a great method for memorizing and
visualizing chords on the fret board.   Have you ever wanted to play
a particular chord at a different place on the fret board?   Did you
know that you can play the same chord name in several different places on the
guitar neck?  Notice that the 1
^st
5 diagrams below are based
off of chords C, A, G, E, D (open major chords).   Each chord form
below is a C major, however you can see that their shapes are based off of the
open major chord forms C, A, G, E and D. 

By now you can see why we call this the CAGED system. 
Notice the last diagram showing all 5 chord forms overlapping on one fret
board.  This means that if a song called for a C chord, you could play any
one of those forms below and it would sound good.

The “1’s” below represent the tonic, key or root.  In
this case, the root is C.  The “3’s” and “5’s” represent the 3
^rd
and 5
^th
scale notes of the major scale.

C Chord Form

A Chord Form

G Chord Form