The CAGED System, Computed

Play open C, A, G, E, and D. Those five grips are not five separate facts — they are the only five ways a major chord can sit on the EADGBE grid, and every one of them becomes movable the moment a barre replaces the nut. Slide them, stack them in order, and they chain up the neck until the first one returns twelve frets later. That loop is the CAGED system, and on this site it is not an explainer with hand-drawn diagrams: every claim below is computed from the same voicing library that powers the chord reference, and recomputed in CI on every change.

One chord, five addresses

Here is C major, the worked example. The library tags each of its five CAGED voicings with a shape and a position; sorting them by their starting fret gives the neck order — and the order spells C-A-G-E-D, which is the whole mnemonic:

Read the table as an itinerary: the same chord lives at five addresses, and the shape names tell you which open grip to make at each one. Where one shape ends, the next begins — the top of the C shape is the bottom of the A shape, the top of the A shape is the bottom of the G shape, and so on until the D shape hands back to the C shape an octave up.

Beyond major: the tagged library

The system is usually taught on major chords and abandoned there. The voicing library behind this site tags CAGED shapes for seven chord qualities — major, minor, diminished, dominant 7, major 7, minor 7, and m7b5 — across all twelve roots: 420 tagged voicings, each carrying its shape letter and position number. Pick any root on the chord pages and the five shapes are there, sorted up the neck, playable on tap.

The five shapes

Each shape gets its own page, with its movable form, its root string, and a table of where it starts for every root — all twelve rows recomputed from the library:

• The C shape — root on the 5th string, the ringing one.
• The A shape — root on the 5th string, the workhorse barre.
• The G shape — roots on both E strings, the stretchy one.
• The E shape — root on the 6th string, the six-string barre.
• The D shape — root on the 4th string, the treble triangle.

The system is not the hands

One honest limit of everything on this site: a shape system tells you where the notes are, never how to make them speak. Bending, vibrato, slides, hammer-ons, picking hand mechanics — those are instruction, and instruction is not something a voicing library can compute, so this site does not pretend to publish it. String Warrior's technique guides cover that half properly, with playable tab and an honest per-technique note about what its audio can and cannot reproduce. Learn the geography here; learn the touch there.

Why bother?

Because it converts memory into navigation. Without a system, 62 qualities × 12 roots is an encyclopedia; with it, a chord symbol is a root note plus a handful of shapes you already own. It also links straight into lead playing: each CAGED position sits on top of one of the five pentatonic boxes, so the chord under your fingers and the scale around it become the same map. Start with the shape pages above, then test yourself in the fretboard explorer — light up a root everywhere it lives, and name the shape that would grab it at each spot.