CAGED: 3 Harmonic Layers of the Minor Scale (With Notes)

Charts to help you learn the CAGED system for guitar and approach each of its patterns gradually by adding in more harmonic information.

Visual appearance

5 CAGED patterns are presented as 3 incremental harmonic layers:

• (1) root triad chord tones
• (2) minor pentatonic tones (strictly 2 notes-per-string scale patterns)
• (3) full Minor scale (a mix of 2 and 3 notes-per-string scale patterns)

Each next layer adds extra notes to the previous layer until each CAGED shape has all notes of the Minor scale.

• Playing triad only tones will give you notes of the A-Minor chord.
• Playing pentatonic layer will give you notes of the A-Minor pentatonic scale.
• And playing the full scale version will give you notes of the full A-Minor scale.

Squares with a darker fill represent root notes of the scale (tonic). Circles with a lighter fill are the rest notes of the given layer. The letters inside the circles and squares represent note names of the A-Minor scale. All diagrams are isolated from one another to let you focus on just a single pattern (and layer) at a time.

Practical application

You can think of these layers as notes which:

• (1) make up the chord
• (2) are next to the chord
• (3) are harmonically more distant from the chord (in other words, moving from consonant notes to less consonant notes in relation to the root triad tones)

What this practically means is that this separation lets you target these layers individually and evoke the right effect at the right time when you're soloing. And root tones have a stronger visual emphasis to provide soloing landmarks and a better overview of the shape's primary "anchor points" to help you memorize and internalize patterns of all layers.

One variation of this reference shows notes of the layers superimposed on the notes of the full Minor scale and highlights the non-layer tones as blank filler notes that you can use either as passing tones or simply visually observe and study how each layer shape "fits" within the full CAGED pattern.