3 Basic Triads For Beginners – Explained
If you’re a beginner guitarist, or even if you have been playing for some time, you may feel like there are a million different ways to start applying theory to the fretboard. You may think that they’re all far too complicated, unnecessary, and unusable exercises that provide nothing but hours of unenjoyable practice. In a way, you’re completely right. There are about a million ways to start applying theory to the fretboard and they’re not that fun. But using arpeggios with a little help from the CAGED system is one of the few ways that you can remedy this and actually achieve fast growth and musical results – a nice bonus.
The CAGED system
Again, even if you’re a beginner or you’ve been playing for a while, you will encounter open chords. These are the chords that are played right down by the headstock, often using open strings. For the CAGED system, you’ll need to know how to play C, A, G, E, and D – and that’s it (the keen eyed amongst you will also be able to figure out where the CAGED system name comes from).
To summarise the CAGED system: if you know these 5 basic open chords, moving them up and down the fretboard will allow you to play every other chord.
We’ll come back to this in a second – so hold that thought for now.
What is an arpeggio?
An arpeggio is essentially a separated chord – i.e. one note at a time. Typically, most chords are arpeggiated by playing the 1st, 3rd, and 5th note of that chord, in that order – this is called a triad.
Additionally, if you’ve learnt your scales by now, you’ll know that the 3rd of a scale can be either major or minor.
This is the only thing that separates major and minor chords.
Now, if you know E major, you know that if you take your finger off the G string, the chord then becomes E minor. This is because you have flattened (or lowered) the 3rd from a major 3 rd to a minor 3rd.
Do this for the other 4 major chord shapes in the CAGED system chords and you now have 5 minor shapes and their respective arpeggios – it is really that simple. All you need to do is find where the root note of each chord is and move it to the root of whatever chord you want to play – i.e, move C major up 2 frets to make it a D major, or move D major up two frets to make it an E major – and so on.
You don’t even have to play all the strings of a chord for an arpeggio – as long as you play the 1st (or root), 3rd, and 5th you’re all set.
CAGED System Arpeggios
Now, combining this knowledge of arpeggios with the CAGED system shapes allows you to play any set of triads, from any sequence, anywhere. The added beauty of the CAGED system is that each shape has the notes of a triad in a different order – so a repeated picking pattern used for a sequence of these shapes can give a very musical outcome. Be sure to check out our recent lesson on this to see (and hear) it in action!
