The CAGED System

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.

Above are all five of C major, each in its own color. Tap a letter to mark one, pick it from the menu to see it alone, step ‹ › up the neck, change the root or the chord — or tap any note to see which shape holds it. The presets under it open the same fretboard on the minor chords, the pentatonic boxes, the scale positions and the seventh chords, each with a page of its own; 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

The C shape on its own — the open chord, at the nut. It is C major because of where it sits, not because of what it is.

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. Leave the C shape where the last section put it and bring the pentatonic in around it: 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

The five shapes again, in C. Every shape has the third in it somewhere, at least once; find it before you read on.

Dominant: add the seventh

Back to the major shapes. This time look for the root each shape has twice — once in the bass and once higher up, on the D, G, B or high E string.

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.

Why it is five pictures

It is worth being exact about what CAGED is good at, because it isn't the guitar and it isn't the music — it is paper. A shape is the one thing about playing that survives being printed: six lines, a few dots, and a stranger a thousand miles away has your hand. Everything the guitar has ever been taught by ran through that constraint — the chord boxes at the back of a songbook, the grid paused on screen in a lesson, five diagrams in a forum reply, a photo of a whiteboard. CAGED is what the neck looks like once you have to send it through a page, and that is a genuine achievement: it is compact, it is memorable, and it gives two strangers a shared vocabulary, so "the G form at the seventh" means the same six dots to both of them.

It is also, for exactly that reason, a crutch. A static diagram can only carry what holds still, and almost nothing about playing does. The moves the last two sections were about — a third dropping a fret, a seventh squeezed in where a finger is free, a voice lifted an octave — cannot be drawn as a sixth letter, so they come back as more pictures: a chart for the minor set, a chart for the sevenths, three more for each chord's inversions, and nothing joining them but memory. The five shapes aren't wrong. They are a compression of something that was never still, chosen because a book cannot listen to you play.

What to learn once you know them

NoSheet starts from the other end — from the part a picture can't hold. 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 named by their degrees — the same 1, 3, 5 whether the root is on the low E, on the A string or on a piano key — and there are far too many such shapes to print, which is the point. You learn to build them rather than recall them, and the small things combine: a triad becomes a seventh by adding a degree, a major becomes a minor by moving one, and any two shapes a fret apart are neighbours you can step between. That is the same awareness a melody runs on — a line moves by steps within a range, and the harmony under it is built from the notes nearby — which is why it carries across the whole neck where five landmarks cannot.

None of that fits on a page, which is what the app is for. The basic shapes it starts with are the CAGED shapes on guitar — the diagram is where everyone begins, including it — and from there it goes to the small shapes, the inversions and the sevenths, training each by ear in the chord shape game: a chord sounds, the root shows, and you build the rest. Where a book would have had to print a new chart, it listens instead.

So: learn CAGED for the map — it is the best thing anyone ever fitted onto a page. Then learn the degrees, which are the map's coordinates, and the map folds up on its own.