Throughout your guitar journey you may have seen the term ‘guitar positions’ crop up here and there. Confused about it’s meaning? You aren’t alone – it’s one of those guitar terms that causes a lot of misunderstanding for guitar students. And it’s often not explained correctly either.
By the end of the article, you will have a clear system so that you can confidently play major scales over the entire fretboard, laying the foundation for being able to improvise anywhere on the guitar neck.
Practicing a scale up one string is a good way to gain proficiency in mastering fret position shifts – see the video below.
Open Position Guitar Scales
Likewise, if you play C major but play all of the notes of the scale around fret position 5, you’ll get this pattern instead:
So in this instance, the term ‘guitar position’ refers to the patterns the notes of a scale makes on the fretboard if you stay in the same
You might have seen this 2nd meaning of ‘guitar positions’ defined in various ways, such as ‘scale positions’, ‘scale shapes’, ‘fretboard areas’, and ‘patterns’.
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This article is now going to focus on using these two concepts of fret positions and scale patterns to learn the notes of the major scale over the entire fretboard so that you can improvise with this scale anywhere on the guitar neck.
There are various different ‘scale pattern systems’ you can learn. The best one to learn initially is known as the Five Pattern System.
To put it in context, here is a neck diagram of a G Major scale over the first 12 frets on the guitar.
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Unfortunately, there’s no standardized naming convention for these patterns – which adds another layer of confusion when trying to understand guitar positions.
Later on in this article, I’ll explain in details my preferred method for naming and understanding them, but feel free to use one of the other methods if you find it makes more sense to you.
It also won’t help very much for you to remember the patterns, as it doesn’t describe what the pattern looks like or how it functions.
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Taking Pattern 2 as an example, the lowest note is an ‘A’ on the 5th fret, so the scale starting from the first note will be ABCDEF#GA, which is the A Dorian mode – hence the name ‘Dorian’ for the pattern.
(For those of you familiar with guitar modes, you may notice that Lydian and Locrian modes are missing. The Lydian pattern is on the same fret position as Phrygian, and the Locrian pattern is at the same fret position as Ionian, which is why they’re omitted in this system.)
You may think that this would be a good way to learn the patterns, especially as a jazz guitarist with the emphasis on modes in jazz theory – but I disagree.
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The modes in each pattern depending on what note you start on, so it’s misleading to label a shape as just a single mode like ‘Dorian’ or ‘Aeolian’’.
A confession – this is how I actually learned the scale patterns back in the day during my university studies in jazz guitar, but it did cause a bit of confusion when it came to soloing – the only time it has helped much is when I’m playing modal jazz tunes.
The best way to learn these shapes is by using the CAGED system, a very clever acronym that can unlock the entire fretboard. Let’s take a look.
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The CAGED system is a great way to label and remember the five patterns. The 5 letters – C, A, G, E, D – refer to open major chords that you learned on the guitar as a beginner:
Because these chords are familiar to nearly every guitarist on the planet, they’re a great tool to help remember the scale patterns and to also remember the order of the scale patterns as you go up the neck.
Out of this pattern, you can plot out a shape that matches the same shape as the open C chord above – as if it is ‘hiding’ in the scale pattern.
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Then, start from the lowest root note (in red) and play the scale all the way up to the highest note of the pattern, then all the way down to the lowest note in the pattern, then finally finish on the note you started, like this:
If you look at each of the patterns in turn, likewise you can see that there’s the relevant open chord shape that ‘lives’ in each one:
To illustrate this let’s now play each position in the key of D Major (the notes in grey are where the patterns overlap):
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As we move up the neck from pattern to pattern, the names of the patterns spell – you guessed it – CAGED!
As you play the sequence of patterns up the guitar neck in other keys, a good rule of thumb is to drop the first pattern that is beyond the 14th fret down the octave, in order that the patterns all fit on the most useful area of the guitar neck.
In the CAGED system, the next pattern following the ‘C’ pattern will always be the ‘A’ pattern, following this will be ‘G’ and so on.
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As you can see, the CAGED system is an excellent method for quickly learning what the shapes look like, and also remembering the order of the patterns as you move up the guitar neck.
Learn these simple major scale licks in each of the 5 CAGED patterns (you may need to move them up or down an octave depending on what pattern you are playing):
Now that you’ve gained familiarity with the 5 patterns, it’s now time to learn how to ‘thread’ the patterns together so you can switch between them during your solos, enabling you to improvise anywhere on the fretboard at your will.
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The process involves using fret position shifts to move to and from each scale pattern as you move up and down the neck.
Now use this simple melodic sequence to highlight each CAGED pattern as you move through it (note – some of the fingering is different on the way down to make it more playable) :
Try to shift from one pattern to the other, starting from a root note in one pattern to end up in the root note of another.
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Just experiment – there are millions of possible fingering combinations, so it’s good to be able to shift spontaneously between patterns using different fingerings.
It helps to keep firmly in mind the root notes of each pattern as a reference point to go by as you move up and down the neck.
This is especially relevant for jazz, as the key changes in jazz are thick and fast – in pop or rock there are usually very few key changes to deal with.
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For this exercise, start with one of the CAGED patterns in G Major and then move to each new key using the relevant pattern
Once you’ve mastered the above starting with one of the CAGED patterns, repeat the exercise with a different one until you can easily change keys with all of the five CAGED patterns.
Here’s another chord progression you can practice in a similar manner, starting in the key of Bb Major, then moving to Ab Major before finishing in C Major.
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Starting out initially with the 5 CAGED scale patterns as outlined in this article is a very good initial step to mastering the fingerboard.
Each of the other scale types, such as harmonic minor, melodic minor and pentatonic minor, also have 5 patterns you need to learn (that are really just alterations of the CAGED patterns).
Understanding the two different meanings of the term is very important, and by using the 5-pattern CAGED system you now have a secure and elegant method to understand how guitar positions work, so you can navigate the guitar fretboard with confidence.Most guitar players who come to me for help already know one or two pentatonic scale patterns. Usually it’s the Minor pentatonic pattern one scale, you know the
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What started as pure joy when you first played this pattern over a blues or rock background track, has slowly turned into frustration.
As you progress in the songs you choose to learn, or with the band members you play with, you start to feel very limited.
It may be that that pattern won’t give you the notes you need to play a certain song, or you feel everything you play is starting to sound the same.
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Or, it could be that the notes in that pattern just don’t match the songs and the styles that you are trying to play.
Unfortunately, this is one of the toughest stops on the journey of mastering the guitar. Most players get frustrated and settle for the “blues box”.
After I had been playing guitar for a few years, I got the courage to join a band!It was just what you might think: a bunch of guys playing way too loud and having a lot of fun.
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We played a few covers and I learned the lead parts from tablature. These sounded great but I didn’t know why they worked so well.
I had
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