The CAGED Arpeggios

Here is our first shape, the Major C Shape.

Can you see how the open C chord fits into this?

All the notes we are playing here, are notes that fit into a Major Triad. We've simply used octaves to increase the amount of options we have.

So, if we'd like to play along with an A major chord, we simply make sure we play this arpeggio with A as our root note, and all the other notes of the shape will fall into line.

Notice that the root note is not the lowest note of the shape!

Now, we have the minor shape.

As you know, the difference between the Major and Minor Triads lies entirely in whether we have a Major or Minor 3rd.

So, for the Minor C shape, all we've had to do is flat each 3rd from the Major shape.

This shape can be a bit of a stretch! But you can do it.

Lastly, let's look at a slightly more complicated one.

Here we have the Dominant 7th C Shape Arpeggio.

There are more notes in this shape than the previous two, since we're dealing with a Tetrad now. We've got our root note, Major 3rd, Perfect 5th, and a Minor 7th.

Playing through this, you will hear that distinctive Dom7 sound. You can really make that feeling stand out by playing this arpeggio over a Dominant 7th chord.

Here's the Major A shape.

You might be wondering why we need this shape, since the C shape already gave us an arpeggio that starts on the A string.

Notice, though, that this shape builds to the right of the root note, though, while the C shape builds to the left - that will come in handy.

Here is our Major G Shape Arpeggio.

Now we have our first shape that builds off of the low E string.

If you look closely at this shape, you may notice that the Form 1 of the Pentatonic could be overlaid on top of it.

We will look at this in more detail in when we explore using Arpeggios to Improvise over the 1-4-5-1!

For now, just make a special note of this shape, you'll want to be able to recall it later.

Here's the Major shape.

It's easy to see how this shape was built off the barre shape. All we've done is add in additional spots to play the Major 3rd!

If you've been shying away from putting your pinky to full use you might have a bit of trouble with this one at first.

Keep at it! The pinky gets stronger over time like everything else, it just takes a little conscious effort to bring it up to speed.

Here's the Minor Variant.

On the G, B, and E strings, we hit the same frets. While this does make it easier to play, it also poses an issue if we want to stick to only having one note ring at a time.

You can make it work by "rolling" your index finger along the strings to fret and mute different strings at different times, but it's a little tricky. 

You can always choose another arpeggio shape if this poses an issue for you. (This is one of the many reasons we want to know a lot of shapes!)

And lastly, the Dominant 7th variant.

Of course, this is simply our Major shape with a flat 7th interval added.

We will see this shape crop up as we advance in our 12 Bar Blues improvisation. 

Some forms of the 12 Bar Blues actually play the tonic chord (root chord) as a Dominant 7th! Once we start examining this in detail, you'll definitely want to know how to play a Dom7 arpeggio with the root note on the E string, and this shape is perfect for that.

Here's the Major D Shape Arpeggio.

These shapes aren't my favourite. They're a little tricky to play, and we can already play an arpeggio starting from any string using the other 4 shapes. So why learn them?

Because these shapes are going to be valuable for so much more than just simple arpeggiation of a chord.

For one, navigating the fretboard using the CAGED method requires knowledge of all 5 shapes.

For another good reason - as soon as we get into Triad Inversions, you'll see how handy the D shapes are!