The CAGED System of Guitar – E Shape – Part 2

The first shape that we will try to understand is the E shape. Make sure you have read Part 1 of this series otherwise the following information might not make any sense.

Recognizing the Shape

Now let us look at the group of notes at the top of the fret in the fret board on the left side. I have extracted those notes as shown below:

Can you see where this notes have come from? I hope you do!

Those of you who are aware of barre chords will recognize the above set of notes as the F Barre Chord!

Adding the Barre

Now let’s add the barre on some of the notes above as shown below:

Adding the barre means we are pressing all the strings at that fret to make it a bar. By default, barring is always present at the nut. When we press all the strings with our index finger (or with a bar), we are effectively shifting the nut position to that particular fret.

But the important thing to notice is that the remaining notes are nothing but our regular E major chord! Ah! So you finally found it!

Something to Remember

The whole group of notations above ( F Barre chord ) has the root note on the sixth string, first fret which is the F note. If you remember, every shape which does not depend on open strings can be moved over the fret board. So if we move the root note to the third fret, we will get the G Major Barre chord which will have the SAME E Shape. The shape remains the same, but different root notes give different chords.

We will discuss the barre chords in details in the relevant lesson.

Next in CAGED System is the D shape – Part 3.

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