CAGED PART 1 – OPEN TO MOVEABLE CHORDS

Watch the animated version of this lesson

video on my YouTube Channel:
https://youtu.be/HeQeuUGC45g

In the early stages of learning to play the guitar, every guitarist learns to play the five Open Major
chords. They are…

A Major E Major C Major

3 1
2 1
1 3 2
2 3

G Major D Major

4 2
3
1

1
2

Learning to play these chords allows you to play lots of songs and develops important skills that
serve as a foundation for future learning.

Try using the Open Major chords to play this chord progression:

A | E | C | G | D ||

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Although learning these open chords is important, they are only five of the 12 Major chords which
can be played.

F C G
A#/Bb D
D#/Eb A
G#/Ab E
C#/Db B
F#/Gb

In this first lesson on CAGED chord, I’m going to show you how to transform your five Open Major
chords into Moveable chords which will allow you to play all of the possible Major chords.

Open Chords Moveable

Chords

C, A, G, B, F, A#/Bb,
D#/Eb, G#/Ab,
E, D C#/Db, F#/Db

Moveable Chord
Now before we do that, let me explain what a moveable chord is.

A Moveable chord is a chord shape on the guitar that can be

moved up or down the fretboard to give you different chords of
the same type or Quality; Major chords for example.

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It’s possible you may have used Moveable chords already without even realizing it; namely Power
Chords. Many riffs and songs are played by shifting power chords up or down the fretboard and
these are very often Moveable chords.

A Power Chord (A5) G Power Chord (G5)

4 4
3 3
1 1

D Power Chord (D5)

4
3
1

Try this progression:

A5 | G5 | D5 | A5||
However, this doesn’t work quite the same way with the Open Chords. If you try sliding your fingers
up the fretboard with the E Major chord you end up with a bunch of weird sounding chords, which
may sound okay, but are certainly not Major chords.

E Major Fmaj7(#11)/E F#7add4/E

1 1 1
3 3 3
2 2 2

E7sus2 Emaj7(b13)

1 1
3 3
2 2

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The reason this doesn’t quite work is because we only moved some of the notes of our original E
Major chord, specifically the ones our fingers were holding down. We forgot about the Open Strings!

1
3
2

Open Strings
Fretted Strings

In order to move the chord and have them continue to be Major chords, ALL of the notes of the
chord have to move the same number of frets.

To move all the notes of E Major together, it’s useful to see all the notes that are being played as one
pattern, like this:

Fret Zero
(Open Strings)
If you like to think about the fret numbers, then try thinking about the Open strings as being fret
number zero (0).

Before we can move this group of notes, we will need to be able to hold them down using our
fingers. We rearrange the fingers so that the 1st finger is positioned behind the nut and the
remaining fingers hold down everything else. This may seem unnecessary right now, but it will
become important in a moment.

E Major E Major (repositioned)

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When one finger holds down multiple strings at once, we call this Barring. If you have difficulty
with barring multiple strings, I made another lesson which teaches the barring technique that I use
and teach to my students. You will find a link to this lesson in the below.

Barring Technique Video Lesson

Learn the technique I teach my private guitar students that

will make playing Barre Chords a piece of cake!

Click the link below to watch it now:

https://youtu.be/EzPyRGfRS3s

Now that ALL of the notes can be held down using your fingers, we can move the entire pattern up
at once and keep the Major sound of the chord. Moving this chord up one fret gives us the F Major
chord.

E Major F Major

1 1
1 1
2 2
4 4
3 3
1 1

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For now, don’t worry about why this is F Major, however I will be
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To help you prepare for that lesson, I recommend working on learning the
notes of the fretboard. I’ve specifically created a course designed to help you
learn all of the notes on your fretboard and memorize them once-and-for-
all.

Click on the image to the right to learn more:

Try using F Major in the following chord progression:

C | F | G | C ||
Now that we have a Moveable Chord, we can simple move F Major up another fret to give us F# or Gb
Major.

F Major F#/Gb Major

1 1
1 1
2 2
4 4
3 3
1 1

Try this progression which uses the F# Major chord:

D | F# | G | D ||
Let’s now take a look at turning another of our Open Major chords and into a Moveable chord. This
time, we will start with the Open A Major chord.

A Major

3
2
1

Once again, we need to reposition the fingers so that the 1st finger sits behind the nut or on the zero
fret.

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 A Major A Major (repositioned)

We can now move the chord up one fret, giving us an A# or Bb Major chord.

A Major A#/Bb Major

1 1
4 4
3 3
2 2
1 1

Try this progression using Bb Major.

G | Bb | C | G ||
By moving this shape up another fret we get a B Major chord.

A#/Bb Major B Major

1 1
4 4
3 3
2 2
1 1

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And, here is a progression using B Major:

E | A | B | E ||
Moving on to the Open C Major chord. We rearrange the fingers and move the chord up one fret to
give us a C# or Db Major chord.

C Major

1
2
3

Now we reposition the fingers so that the 1st finger is behind the nut.

C Major C Major (repositioned)

Now that the we are holding down the open strings, we can move up one fret to get the C# or Db
Major chord.

C Major C#/Db Major

1 1
2 2
1 1
3 3
4 4

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And, now try this progression which uses C# Major.

A | C# | D | A ||
Next, we start from the Open D Major chord.

D Major

2
3
1

Now we reposition the fingers so that the 1st finger is behind the nut.

D Major D Major (repositioned)

We can now move this shape up one fret to get the D# or Eb Major chord.

D Major D#/Eb Major

3 3
4 4
2 2
1 1
1 1

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Try this progression using Eb Major.

G | Em | Eb | D | G ||
Finally, let’s look at the Open G Major chord.

G Major

1
2

We once again rearrange our fingers to free up the 1st finger so that it can sit behind the nut.

G Major G Major (repositioned)

We then move it up one fret to give us G# or Ab Major (shown on next page).

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 G Major G#/Ab Major

4 4
1 1
1 1
1 1
2 2
3 3

Try this progression which uses Ab Major.

C | Am | Ab | G | C ||
So to recap, by converting our five Open Major chords into Moveable chord, we were able to play all
of the 12 Major chords on the guitar.

Take your time learning to play each of these chords. Make sure you understand how we got from
the Open Chord to Moveable chord, and ensure that each note rings out as you play them.

I recommend learning these Moveable chord shapes in the order that they were presented in this
lesson:

Open E Open A Open C Open D Open G

In the next lesson in this series, we will look at why these chords are named the way they are and
look at how these moveable chord shapes may be used to play chords anywhere across the
fretboard.

That’s all for now. Thanks for working through this lesson.

Don’t forget to watch the video lesson:

https://youtu.be/HeQeuUGC45g

You can also post your thoughts and questions in

the comments section.

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