One Shape to Rule Them All
Before we begin... although the following is supposed to be approachable to non-Jazz guitarists, it does assume that you know a few basic chords and that you have a some knowledge of note-name, what a ‘semitone’ is etc. If I use terms you don't understand, a quick web-search will probably help clarify matters.
Without further ado, we'll start by considering a nice full open ‘E Major’ chord (or just plain ‘E’ if you like).
Notice a couple about how we've represented this shape:
- All the root notes (‘1’) are shown as squares.
- The lowest root note is coloured red.
After digging this chord for a few days, we might decide we'd like to include the ‘IV’ chord of E (i.e. the chord whose root is five semitones1 above E). That chord is A major (or ‘A’). Let's assume we don't already know this chord.
We could move every note up 5 frets and play a bar-chord but that'd be cheating. Instead, let's try the following:
-
Shift every note in the chord on to the same fret2
of the next higher string.
We lose the note that was on the first string but, were it not for the fact that the note that is now on string 2 is a fret to low, this would already be have a chord of A Major. So... -
Move the note on string 2 up a fret.
Hey presto! We now have a 5-string A Major chord. The only thing left to do is to figure out what to do with the 6th string. Fortunately, this is pretty straightforward: - Copy whatever ends up on string 1 to the same fret of string 6.
We can do this because these strings are tunes exactly two octaves apart. For now, we'll keep these notes greyed out.
Although the resulting ‘A’ chord should be familiar to most readers, it is important that you take a few moments to make sure you understand exactly how we derived it from the preceding ‘E’ chord.
Okay, let's see how far we can push this idea. If we apply the same procedure to our ‘A’ chord (i.e. move the notes over to the next higher string; raise the note on the 2nd string; and copy the note on string 1 to the same fret of string 6) we get a good old open ‘D’ chord.3
When we apply the procedure to the ‘D’ chord, we can no longer ignore the notes below the ‘red’ root note. This is because the note on the 6th string is itself a root. We'll colour this one blue to distinguish it from the one that's made its way on to the 3rd string. We now have a nice Bluegrass-style open ‘G’ shape.
If we carry on, our next chord is an open ‘C’. Admittedly, we normally learn this chord with the 1st string played open but work with me here..
If you're of a nervous disposition, you might want to take some deep breaths and brace yourself for what's about to happen - it's pretty mind-blowing.
Applying our procedure once more introduces another root at the bottom of the chord. And lo and behold, we've ended up with our original ‘E’ shape albeit a fret higher.
I think we should all take a step back and try to come to terms with what we've just encountered. Yes. It's true. If we continue to apply the procedure described above, we get a repeating cycle of five shapes. This is sometimes known as the CAGED system after the open chord forms that each shape resembles.
Let's now take a look at these shapes side-by-sidethem side-by-side.
With a bit of luck, you should now be able to follow the progress of the shape as it moves across the strings. The ‘red’ root-note makes it all the way from the lowest to the highest string; and the ‘blue’ root-note introduced in the G shape makes similar progress (as do the other notes, it's just simpler if we concentrate on the roots for now.)
In fact, the ‘blue’ root was present in the original ‘E’ chord (on the 4th string) as was another instance of the ‘red’ root (on string 1). And the ‘red’ one appears for a third time in the final ‘F’ chord. I chose not to highlight these in order to avoid confusion but now that we have a better understanding of what's what, we can include them. We'll also stop greying out the notes below the lowest root.
All these shapes can be thought of as being subset of one ‘super-shape’ made up of alternating ‘red sub-shapes’ such as these:
... and ‘blue sub-shapes’ such as these:
If it wasn't for the fact that the open 2nd and 3rd strings are a major 3rd (4 semitones) apart instead of a perfect 4th (5 semitones) like every other adjacent pair, all the red ‘subshapes’ would be have an identical form, as would the blue ones.4 In fact, guitarists like Stanley Jordan tune their instruments EADGCF (all Perfect 4ths) for this very reason.
To push this idea further, If we had some sort of 11-string guitar tuned in Perfect 4ths, we could (theoretically) have a single repeating ‘super-shape’ like the one shown below.
Don't worry I'm not suggesting that you fork out for a specially commissioned 11-string guitar 5 or even change how you tune your instrument, but try the following:
- Select any 6-string portion of the ‘super-shape’
- Move the two highest notes in your selection up by a fret
- Observe that you will always end up with one of the five ‘CAGED’ shapes we've looked at in this article (albeit at a different fret).
N.B. As already mentioned in a footnote, it's usually best to consider open strings as notes played on ‘fret zero’. Apart from being especially easy to play,6 they an not fundamentally different from fretted notes.
That's about it for this lesson. You may have come across some of these concepts before. However, most explanations concentrate on how the shapes relate along the fretboard (which is also important - we'll consider it in a future instalment) rather than across it; and the fact that they are basically all subsets of the same shape is rarely considered.
I have found that understanding and internalising the concepts presented here is invaluable when it comes to analysis, improvisation, transposition and learning scales, arpeggios, chord progressions etc. It becomes especially useful for negotiating chord changes. (Many guitarists get to the stage where they are comfortable improvising over a given chord using a suitable scale or mode only to fall down soon as they have to move to another chord/scale/mode which with which they are equally familiar).
In the next lesson, I will outline some movable chord-shapes based on what we have covered in this lesson as well as arpeggios, and minor chords.