The CAGED system: five shapes for every chord on the neck

You already know the shapes. C, A, G, E and D are the open chords of a first month, and the CAGED system is the discovery that they are not five chords at all: they are five hand positions, and each one gives you any major chord you like once you move it up the neck and press the strings the nut used to hold. That is the whole system, and what it buys you is a map. A chord stops being a position somebody showed you and becomes somewhere you can find, because you know where its root note lives and which shape fits around it. This page gives you the five shapes of one chord, the root in each, a chart for all twelve, and an honest account of which of the five you will actually use.

What CAGED stands for

Five letters, five open chords, in that order: C, A, G, E, D. Nothing more cryptic than that. What makes the acronym worth remembering is that the order is not arbitrary. Play a C major chord in every position on the neck, from the nut upward, and the shapes come out in exactly that sequence: the C shape lowest, then the A shape, then the G, then the E, then the D, and then the C shape again an octave up. The word CAGED is a reminder of the order you meet them in.

Here is the move that turns an open chord into a movable one. An open chord leans on the nut: some of its strings ring with nothing on them, and those open strings are glued to one place. Slide your hand up two frets and the fingered notes move while the open ones stay behind, and the chord falls apart. So you take the open strings back: the first finger lies flat and covers them, doing what the nut was doing, and now nothing is anchored. The entire arrangement travels, and the fret you put it on decides the name.

Two consequences follow, and they are the reason any of this matters. Every major chord exists in five places rather than one, which is a choice of sound rather than a redundancy. And the name of the chord is decided by a single note: the root, which sits in a known place in each shape. Find the root, put the shape around it, and you have the chord. If the notes of the neck are still a fog, our guitar fretboard notes tool draws them, and the two root strings are the only ones you need at first.

The five shapes of C major, up the neck

One chord, five places. Each position below is a C major and nothing else: same three notes, different strings carrying them, different part of the neck. They are written as six characters read from the thickest string to the thinnest, which is the order you see the strings when the guitar is on your lap. A number is the fret to press, a 0 is an open string, an x is a string you do not play. Positions high on the neck take two digits, so they read a little wider.

The same five, drawn

The strings run vertically with the thickest on the left. A thick line across the top is the nut, and only the C shape has one here: the other four start further up the neck, so their top line is an ordinary fret and the code under the diagram tells you which frets they are. A long bar is the barre, a filled dot is a finger, a circle above a string means play it open and a cross means leave it out. How to read chord diagrams takes every one of those symbols in turn.

Read the five together and the pattern of the system shows up. Each shape hands over to the next as you climb: the C shape sits at the nut, the A shape a few frets up, and so on until the D shape near the twelfth fret, after which the whole series repeats an octave higher. The notes of the chord are the same throughout. What changes is which string carries which note, and that is what makes one position sound round and another thin.

Where the root is in each shape

This is the part that does the work, and it is worth more than the chart further down. The root is the note the chord is named after. Each shape keeps its root on a known string, so finding a chord is two steps: find that note on that string, then build the shape around it.

Notice how the five group themselves. Two shapes are rooted on the sixth string, two on the fifth, one on the fourth. So learning the notes of two strings, the thickest and the one next to it, gives you four of the five shapes. That is twelve notes to know, and it replaces every chart on this page. The sixth string is an E, so one fret up is F, three is G, five is A. The fifth is an A, so two frets up is B, three is C, five is D. Those two facts are the whole of it, and our guitar fretboard notes tool is built to drill them.

CAGED chart: every major chord in all five shapes

Find the chord in the left column and read across: each cell is the fret to put that shape on. Open means the shape in its own open position, where the chord is the one the shape is named after and no barre is needed. Every chord appears five times, and all five are correct.

The chart is calculated from the chromatic scale rather than copied, and the method is worth more than the table because it makes the table unnecessary. The fret is the distance in half steps between the chord you want and the chord the shape gives in open position. A G shape gives G open, and C is five half steps above G, so a G shape at the fifth fret is a C. That is the entire calculation, and you can do it on the bus.

One warning about reading any chart like this one. Past the twelfth fret everything repeats an octave higher, and above roughly the ninth fret the frets are narrow enough that a full six string shape stops being comfortable. The cells are all correct and not all of them are good advice: choose the position closest to the chord you just played, which is the reason that decides it in a real song.

Why E and A shapes come first

Because two of the five carry nearly all the music, and the other three are mostly useful as an explanation. The E shape and the A shape have their roots on the sixth and fifth strings, they work as full chords rather than fragments, and between them they give you every major and minor chord there is. If you learn two things from this page, learn those two.

They are also the two that are already in your hands. The E shape is an open E major played with the second, third and fourth fingers so the first is free to barre. The A shape is an open A major with the fifth string barred instead of ringing. Nothing new to memorize, one new job for the first finger. At the first fret the E shape is an F, which is the chord that stops most beginners, and at the second fret the A shape is a B.

How to make that first finger press evenly, where the thumb goes, and why starting at the fifth fret rather than the first saves weeks: all of that is on our barre chords guide, which is the practical companion to this page. The shapes here are the map, that page is the hand.

The honest order is open chords, then those two barre shapes, then CAGED as the explanation of what you have been doing. If the open shapes are not yet clean, the basic guitar chords are where the time is better spent: CAGED explains a neck you have already started playing on, and it explains nothing to a hand that is still learning to press a string.

CAGED for minor chords

Same five letters, one note lower. A major chord contains a root, a third and a fifth; lower that third by one half step and the chord is minor. In a shape that means moving or lifting a single finger, and the shape stays exactly as movable as it was.

In practice two of the five minor shapes do nearly all the work, and they are the same two that matter in major. Here they are as C minor, so you can compare them with the C major positions above.

Put the minor E shape next to the major one and the difference is one dot on the third string, gone. That single note is the whole distance between major and minor, everywhere in music, and a barre is the clearest place on a guitar to feel it: the finger that lifts is doing all of the emotional work.

The minor versions of the C, G and D shapes exist and are rarely worth the trouble, for the same reason as their major versions: they need stretches or partial fingerings that two better shapes already cover. Learn them the day a particular voicing asks for one, not before.

What CAGED does not do

It does not teach you scales, and the common claim that it does deserves a caveat. There is a real connection between these shapes and the places a scale or an arpeggio sits, and it is a later subject that needs its own page rather than a paragraph here. Treat this page as what it is: a map of where chords live.

It does not replace a capo either, and the two solve different problems. A capo keeps the open shapes you already play and moves the whole guitar up, which keeps the ring of open strings. CAGED gives you the chord without a capo, higher on the neck, with a different and tighter sound. Neither is the better answer, and most players use both: our guitar capo chart says which fret turns which shape into which chord.

And it does not tell you which chords belong together. Knowing five positions for a G major does not tell you that G, C, D and E minor are the chords of one key, which is the knowledge a song actually runs on. That is what our page on the chords in every key is for, and it is the natural next step from here: the key gives you the chords, CAGED gives you the places to play them.