The CAGED System
Five chord shapes, one fretboard — and what to learn once you know them.
Take the five open major chords every guitarist learns first — C, A, G, E and D — and slide each one up the neck with a barre in place of the nut. Every one of them becomes a movable shape, and the five shapes between them cover the whole fretboard: any major chord, in five places, with the root in a different spot each time. That is the CAGED system, and the name is also the order the shapes appear in as you go up the neck, in any key.
Here are all five of C major, each in its own colour. Tap a letter to take one on its own, step ‹ › up the neck, change the root — or tap any note to see which shape holds it. The figure follows the text from here on.
The five shapes
Each shape is an open chord with a barre where the nut used to be. The major triad inside is the same three notes every time; what changes is where the root sits under your hand.
The C shape
Open C, moved up. The root is on the A string under your ring finger, with a second root on the B string. Barred in full it spans four frets and is a stretch, which is why most players use only its top four strings.
The A shape
Open A: three notes in a row on the D, G and B strings, the root on the A string under the barre. This is the fifth-string barre chord, and the shape most people think of after the E.
The G shape
Open G, with roots on both E strings and the open G string in between. It is the widest of the five and rarely played whole above the nut; its top three or four strings are what survive.
The E shape
Open E under a barre — the F chord at the first fret, the sixth-string barre chord, the shape every barre-chord lesson starts with. Roots on the low E, the D string and the high E.
The D shape
Open D: four strings, a triangle on the top three with the root on the D string. Compact and high, it hands over to the C shape an octave up.
Why the order matters
The shapes chain. The top of the C shape is the bottom of the A shape; the A shape's top strings are where the G shape begins; G leads to E, E to D, and after D the C shape returns twelve frets above where it started. Seen together, the whole neck is tiled by one chord, the root moving from string to string. That is what CAGED is actually for: knowing where the roots are, everywhere.
Moving a shape is changing the key
A shape has no key of its own. The E shape at the third fret is G major; at the fifth it is A; at the eighth, C. Whatever fret your barre lands on, the root under it names the chord — and the other four shapes of that chord are waiting above and below it in the same order. Change the root in the figure and watch the five slide together: the pattern never changes, only where it starts.
Each shape has a scale around it
Every shape sits inside one position of the major pentatonic — the notes around the chord that always work over it. Here is the E shape with its pentatonic: the chord is five of the position's notes, and the position is the chord plus the notes within reach. That is what a box is, and why there are five of them; they have a page of their own, and so do the major scale positions they grow into.
Minor: shift the third
Move the third of each shape down a fret and you have the minor set: Am, Em and Dm travel up the neck as comfortably as their major cousins and are the minor barre chords everyone plays. The Cm and Gm forms are another matter — barred whole they are almost unplayable, so what survives of them is their top four strings, which is how the figure draws them. Notice what you actually did: you didn't learn five new shapes, you moved one note in each.
Dominant: add the seventh
Now drop the doubled root a whole step, or squeeze a ♭7 in where a finger is free, and the shapes become seventh chords: C7, A7, G7, E7, D7 — the open dominant chords, moved up. Again one note changed, and again the letters get thinner: the E7 shape is a comfortable chord, the D7 shape a small one, and the five are already less a system than a habit of naming.
Where the letters run out
Look at what the last two sections were: not shapes at all, but moves — a third shifted, a seventh added. CAGED gives you five pictures; the music you play with them is made of notes changing by a fret or two. That is the limit of the map. It teaches where the roots live, gets barre chords under the hand, and connects the pentatonic positions to something you can hear — if you play guitar, learn it. But the letters stop meaning anything past the first page: minor triads worse than major, four-note chords barely, inversions not at all, and the neck between the five landmarks stays blank.
NoSheet starts from the other end. Its unit isn't the shape but the octave: everything within one octave of a root, on any instrument. Inside that, a chord is three or four notes built from their degrees — the same 1, 3, 5 whether the root is on the low E, the A string or a piano key — and there are far too many such shapes to memorise, which is the point. You learn to build them, not to recall them, and small things combine: a triad becomes a seventh by adding one degree, a major becomes a minor by moving one, and any two shapes a fret apart are neighbours you can move between. That local awareness is what connects fluidly across the neck, because it is the same awareness a melody uses — a line moves by steps within a range, and the harmony under it is built from the same nearby notes. The basic shapes the app starts with are the CAGED shapes on guitar; from there it goes to the small shapes, inversions and sevenths, and trains each by ear in the chord shape game: a chord sounds, the root shows, and you build the rest.
So: learn CAGED for the map. Then learn the degrees, which are the map's coordinates — and the map folds up on its own.
Questions
- What does CAGED stand for?
- The five open major chords — C, A, G, E and D — whose shapes, barred and moved up the neck, become five movable shapes for any major chord. It is also the order the shapes follow up the neck in any key.
- Does the CAGED system work for minor chords?
- Partly. Lowering the third of each open chord gives a minor set, but only the Am, Em and Dm forms are comfortable to barre; the Cm and Gm forms survive as their top four strings. Adding a seventh gives the open dominant shapes — C7, A7, G7, E7, D7 — and after that the letters stop helping; inversions don't fit them at all.
- Which CAGED shape should I learn first?
- The E and A shapes — the sixth- and fifth-string barre chords. They are the two shapes with the root under the barre, the easiest to move, and between them they reach every major chord. Add the D, C and G shapes to connect them.
- Does CAGED work on bass, ukulele or piano?
- No — the shapes are the guitar's six strings in standard tuning. What carries over is the idea underneath: knowing where the root is and building the chord from its degrees, which is what NoSheet trains on every instrument.