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Major Scale Positions and CAGED Chord Shapes

Lesson #384 • Sep 12, 2021

Video lesson

Instructional PDF 7 pages

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Follow along with the print-friendly PDF!

It includes all of my notes for this lesson, allowing you to follow along at your own pace. You're free to download, print, and share the PDF across your devices.

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Editor’s notes

Hey friends! Lesson today where I tackle the common positions of the major scale – and explain how each of these positions maps to one of the “CAGED” chord shapes (which I covered in a previous lesson). To me, this was an immensely helpful realization, especially given the numbered scale positions can seem unhelpfully arbitrary and academic, especially when starting out. In this video, I’ll show how you can take any of the CAGED chord shapes (that you’re likely familiar with, even if you don’t know it yet) – and show how to play the major scale based around that shape. This opens the door to improvisation, soloing, adding flourish notes, and all kinds of other good things. So let’s get into it!

Timestamps for this video:

  • 0:00 Overview & Lesson Summary
  • 6:44 Major Scale Crash Course
  • 8:12 Major Scale Positions
  • 11:15 Each CAGED Chord Shape’s Major Scale
  • 12:58 How Scale Positions are Numbered
  • 19:01 Which Position(s) to Learn First?
  • 20:59 Which Fingers To Use In Each Shape
  • 24:19 Intervals and 7th Chords
  • 27:19 A Final Analogy to Explain All This

Need help with CAGED or the 12 Notes?

I made two earlier videos, each of which has a PDF you can download, if you need to get re-familiarized with these concepts.

Learning the 12 notes

Lesson #356 - view lesson notes & get the PDF.

Learning the CAGED Chord Shapes

Lesson #385 - view lesson notes & get the PDF.

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