Why You Only Ever Play in Three Keys

The five open chord shapes you already know, and why they strand you at the first three frets.

If you have been playing a while, you probably know a handful of open chords, and you have probably noticed something frustrating: you can play songs in G, C, D, E and A, and when somebody calls a song in B flat you are stuck.

That is not a gap in your chord vocabulary. It is a consequence of where those chords sit. An open chord uses open strings, and open strings are fixed — they only ever sound one note each. That anchors the whole shape to the nut. You cannot slide an open C up two frets, because the open strings in it do not move with you.

Here are the five shapes in question. You almost certainly know most of them.

C

C. Root on the fifth string, third fret.

321
C · position 1

A

A. Root on the open fifth string.

123
A · position 1

G

G. Root on the sixth string, third fret.

213
G · position 1

E

E. Root on the open sixth string.

231
E · position 1

D

D. Root on the open fourth string.

132
D · position 1

Look at their names in that order: C, A, G, E, D. That spells CAGED, and it is the name of the system this whole path is about.

The idea is simple to state and takes a while to absorb. Each of those five shapes can be lifted off the nut and moved anywhere on the neck, if you replace the nut with your index finger. Once moved, a shape keeps its structure but changes its name — the same fingering, five frets higher, is a different chord.

That gives you five ways to play every chord instead of one. It also means the fretboard stops being a mystery above the third fret, because everything up there is one of five shapes you already know.

One thing to fix in your head before going further, because everything else depends on it: a chord is named after its root note. If you can find the root inside a shape, you can name the chord the shape produces at any fret. Each of the five shapes has its root on a particular string, and that is the thing to memorise — not the fret numbers, which change, but which string the root sits on.

For the E shape and the G shape, the root is on the sixth string. For the A shape and the C shape, it is on the fifth. For the D shape, it is on the fourth.