Chords Organized by Modal Extensions and CAGED Shapes
Hello! Today’s post is for more advanced students and assumes a level of theoretical and technical proficiency. But this post really aligns with how I originally envisioned this Lesson Material page: a place to share the material I create for my students throughout the week.
For a real candid approach, I’ll simply copy + paste what I emailed to my student Devin, who I made this for.
For a short summary, this is a 40 page document of movable chord shapes across the neck.
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“Hi,
Here's a working draft of the full document. I'm currently toying with two different organizational hierarchies for this so it may be redone (or I may just do other versions that'll serve different pedagogical or compositional purposes).
But the chords won't change.
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Legend:
--Square indicates alternative or optional notes
--Triangle indicates unplayed root
--Gray indicates a chord that is unused due to musical or technical (voicing/fingering) reasons.
--Bold indicates essential chords (i.e., I use these all regularly, some at least once per month, others nearly hourly). "Essential" is of course subjective and informed by my personal tastes, but I was marking them with my students in mind.
--Bold + Underline indicates the first time an essential chord is introduced in the document (because many essential chords occur in multiple modes, so appear bolded but not underlined after being introduced).
There are 83 unique essential chords in this document, and if curious, this is how they're divided among the shapes:
C: 17 chords
A: 19 chords
G: 16 chords
E: 21 chords
D: 10 chords
Which gives us some insight into the nature of the instrument!
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And most of those chords are derived from the extensions of the Ionian, Mixolydian, and Dorian modes. Which gives us some insight into our preferences for sounds as a culture, and / or speaks to which modes are more congruent with the natural physics of sound. This is as opposed to the darker three modes (Aeolian, Phrygian, and Locrian), as well as the brightest mode (Lydian).
Feel free to look at or work on this as you'd like, but we'll talk about it during next lesson.
Talk soon!”
