Scale Positions for Guitar - The 3 most Important Systems

Scale Positions are often a topic for heated discussion and are of course also an important system for understanding the guitar in the context of the music we play. This video goes over 3 systems for scale fingerings I talk about how they are constructed and work. I also discuss some of the things they do well and some things they do less well.

To also explain why I think the way I do about scale positions I also talk about my own learning path when it comes to scale fingering systems. Hopefully this will also give you some insight in why I think the way I do about the different systems.

0:00 Intro and Internet Drama
1:05 Who needs scales anyway?
1:25 My Home Made Blues Scale Position
2:10 Learning Improvisation and 5 Scale Positions
2:38 Needing a System and Finding one
3:40 #1 - 7 Position System
5:30 Conservatory Technique and not learning 3NPS
5:52 Learning to play fast with John Petrucci
6:48 #2 - 3NPS (3 Notes Per String)
8:12 How I know the CAGED SYSTEM
8:40 #3 The CAGED System
9:48 Comparing the systems
10:22 The 7 Position systems and a few issues
10:42 Stretches and Position Shifts
12:10 Hidden Stretches in The CAGED system
13:11 The CAGED Scales and The Basic Chords & Arpeggios
14:02 What System do you use? Did I get something wrong?
14:21 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!

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My name is Jens Larsen, Danish Jazz Guitarist, and Educator. The videos on this channel will help you explore and enjoy Jazz. Some of it is how to play jazz guitar, but other videos are more on Music Theory like Jazz Chords or advice on how to practice and learn Jazz, on guitar or any other instrument.

The videos are mostly jazz guitar lessons, but also music theory, analysis of songs and videos on jazz guitars.

My Gear:

[JensLarsen]

Content:
0:00 Intro and Internet Drama
1:05 Who needs scales anyway?
1:25 My Home Made Blues Scale Position
2:10 Learning Improvisation and 5 Scale Positions
2:38 Needing a System and Finding one
3:40 #1 - 7 Position System
5:30 Conservatory Technique and not learning 3NPS
5:52 Learning to play fast with John Petrucci
6:48 #2 - 3NPS (3 Notes Per String)
8:12 How I know the CAGED SYSTEM
8:40 #3 The CAGED System
9:48 Comparing the systems
10:22 The 7 Position systems and a few issues
10:42 Stretches and Position Shifts
12:10 Hidden Stretches in The CAGED system
13:11 The CAGED Scales and The Basic Chords & Arpeggios
14:02 What System do you use? Did I get something wrong?
14:21 Like the video? Check out my Patreon Page!

[Katatopianos]

I originally learned the 7 position system which I refer to as “ modal” which can be played either closed or open. I later also learned the caged system which I found helped me to visualize the fretboard better and see where my chord tones are. Eventually everything merged into one fretboard where I was free from thinking of positions which I think is the ultimate goal.

[tmusic]

The pattern at 6:53 is a type 1A fingering in the "Modern method for guitar"(Berklee Methods). 4 basic fingerings (book 1 and 2) are developed by fingerstrechning to a final stage where you have 12 fingerings along the neck for each key (at book 3). Learned this in the seventees to get rid of the fingering problem. Hard work to learn but Recommended.

[mericle]

The fact that you only started studying scales and jazz when you were 20 is honestly the most inspiring thing i have heard (I am 20 and beginning my jazz journey after years of pentatonic scale noodling)

[rvtyler]

7 position system is what I had been looking for. Thank you!!

[AAAA-lthq]

Mr. Larsen, I am a 2000 graduate of Musician's Institute's GIT school in Los Angeles. I have been playing guitar for about 26 years. The purpose of this post is to discuss a four note per string system.

At GIT, we were taught the CAGED and 3 note per string system. Paul Gilbert is the most famous graduate of the school, and so much of its curriculum, especially for rock and metal players, closely follows the way he plays guitar, with a heavy emphasis on alternate picking, clean technique, and modal playing. Other players have had long lasting influence there as well, such as Keith Wyatt's method of blues guitar instruction and Dan Gilbert's style of jazz fusion. Danny Gill of Lick Library is also one of my favorite teachers and a friend of mine. Danny knew Paul Gilbert when Paul was at the school in 1984. In 2000, I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Mike Stern during a clinic he was offering at GIT. His advice? Be able to locate chord tones and intervals. I have also taken lessons with jazz guitarist Cary DiNigris, when I learned something similar to shell voicings and dropping the 5th as an unnecessary note.

I am less familiar with the Berklee method of instruction, which to me is more jazz oriented. For example, I did not know what "drop 2" meant until I watched your videos.

I started watching your videos a few months ago as a way to see the guitar neck more like a jazz player, with emphasis on improvisation, tension, resolution, passing tones, and non-diatonic playing. Your lessons have helped me very much. Thank you.

Unless I skipped over it, I did not see you mention a 4 note per string scale system in your video. I thought you might have tried this since, in my experience, jazz guitarists tend to see the neck linearly/horizontally, while rock, metal, and blues players tend to see the guitar neck vertically across strings, probably in order to facilitate fast pentatonic bending licks within box shapes.

I am experimenting with a four note per string system. I think it has the following advantages.

1) It encourages the box-based player to see horizontally along the neck.
2) It makes switching between strings easier than 3 notes per string because notes are grouped in 4s instead of 3s.
3) It makes spotting intervals across wide intervallic gaps easier.
4) It trains the guitarist to use all four fingers.
5) It has positions that are more anatomically suited to the human hand than some CAGED positions, especially C and G, which are less used than the E, A, and D forms.

I like CAGED because it breaks the neck down into manageable spaces that fit in neatly with pentatonic minor box shapes. However, when I go into legato playing, I shift to 3 (and ultimately 4) notes per string mode.

CAGED also makes the teaching of barre chords much easier. Scales, barre chords, and arpeggios are all tightly integrated with CAGED. However, it tends to limit the guitarist by making one see the guitar neck as shapes instead of intervals. I am still working on improving being able to quickly identify intervallic relationships regardless of shape, whether above or below the root note. I am also working on trying to play everything I can within a 5 to 7 fret space on the guitar so I can minimize unnecessary movement.

Compositionally, now I am more interested in chord melody, counterpoint, voice leading with chord extensions, inversions, secondary dominants, flat 5 substitutions, the relationship between diminished and 7th chords, and other advanced topics such as those covered in your lessons.

Again, thank you very much for your work, and if you have thoughts on four notes per string from a jazz player's perspective, I would love to see a video on them.

Aaron

[brutalslam]

Great overview! The 7 position system is outlined in A Modern Method for Guitar (Vol. 1, 2 and 3) by William Leavitt published by Berklee Press. This is the first time I've ever seen anyone mention it. Everyone always seems to favour 3nps or Caged. My guitar teacher in the 80's used that series as the workbooks for my lessons. ☺

[MindsetMastery]

I know the CAGED system, the 7 position 3NPS system and the 5 position system. And i basically use all of them in different situations. I like the CAGED system because it layed out the neck in a way that made it easy to understand and know where i am at all times. I also use the CAGED system for chords, triads, and their inversions. CAGED system really made it easy to see all the triads and inversions on the neck. However, when i practice my scales, i almost always use the 7 positon 3 NPS. I find this system with the 3 NPS much easier to economy pick and alternate pick for obvious reasons. But i also know the closed scale shapes also, so when i am improvising it is easier for me to see all the notes of a given scale laid out for me.

[GlennMichaelThompson]

Hi Jens. The 7 position system really isn't discussed enough. Honestly this is the only video I've ever seen it mentioned and shown with these exact fingerings anywhere on Youtube. It's the one I've always used to show students first. I first learned it from the Modern Method for Guitar volumes. My parents bought them for me when they went to Boston back around 1977. Best souvenir from Boston they could have possibly got for me! God bless them!😇✨💫

[hommedemystere]

One observation about 3NPS, Leavitt, and CAGED system scales is that 3NPS has the most stretches (18) and CAGED the fewest (2), with Leavitt in the middle (8). There are some advantages to having fewer stretches in that arpeggios are easier (requiring fewer stretches), and chromatic notes at the edges of the boxes are more available. These are important considerations, especially for those with smaller hands! :)

[rhysgerwin]

You and I had the exact same stages of development in our understanding of scales. It's comforting

[ggauche]

I play sax and watch your videos basically for fun and general info and I've watched this one before. After a 30 year break I got a guitar again a month ago, pretty much for harmonic background stuff, and now really see the value of this vlog. You have a knack of going straight to the centre of a topic. Once again, thanks Jens, a fantastic video.

[thomasressler]

This is another extremely informative and helpful video. I'm returning to the guitar after more than a decade, and I've really only known the blues, country and classic rock approach to scales, and have been dying to find exactly this kind of information presented in a manner that was accessible for me. Thank you SO much!

[bwinters]

I started on piano (adult, selfstudy, jazz focus), so I know my scales pretty well. I bought a guitar on a whim, to expand my „musical horizon“. When I was trying out playing melodies on guitar, the caged system didn‘t really stick. It helped me understand playing chords all over the fretboard, but made melodies really confusing. So I quickly gave up on melodies and stuck to playing chords.

Just recently I wanted to practice playing some real book melodies again and by chance found your berklee 7 position system pdf on google images, when I was searching for a system for major scales on guitar. It makes a lot of sense for me and I love it. As somebody with a big love for music theory, the berklee 7th position system just resonates well.

Thank you by introducing me to this system, even though it was just by chance! I’ve been watching your channel even before finding the berklee 7th position pdf and it has been a great help. My favorite channel when it comes to music theory + guitar playing.

[strings]

I have been playing guitar as a hobby all my adult life - mostly jazz but some classical. Now that I'm 80, making more than 4-fret stretches is very difficult because of arthritis. For chord melody and comping I find that triads are very useful for ease of fingering. Mostly I use shell triads, e.g., F, B & G for G7, D, C & F for Dm7, E, C & G for Am7, etc., plus diminished chords for connection (ala Barry Harris.) Using triads thusly, allows for faster execution of changes with less stretching.

[Wagohowardhanahou]

If you watch listen and teach these lessons you become an amazing instructor and a better musician! He has a practical patterns and methods of how to “solo”, choose voicings, and vocabulary to express yourself. Super excellent!

[johnchan]

CAGED cuz it’s really connecting the chord and arpeggio shape very easily!!

And the diatonic scale connects with pentatonic well!

[arekmenner]

My guitar journey was basically strummed triads -> pentatonic lead -> diatonic lead, so it was CAGED for the pentatonics from the chord shapes, then I learned the full major scales for those 5 positions. I think especially for triad-heavy music, it's a good framework.

I saw someone doing 3nps and picked it up, and I find it much easier for nimble scale sections. I like that I have some new forms and some modifications of old forms. I'll try the 7 position versions. I think it's more worthwhile to just know them all. At a certain point, there's only one fretboard, so they all have to be true.

[ronreis]

I tend to start out with a pentatonic pattern and fill in notes because I learned how to play blues. I learned this after learning tons of scale patterns on the guitar but not really listening. Then my ear woke up. I use pentatonics almost like a like chords. they have the important notes of the triad, major or minor. Add more notes and you find what key you are really in. It's my own cheezy system but it works for me. I can find melodies pretty quick that way. Now that I am trying to improve my improvisation skills, I am trying to see the notes of the chord more. Some of the coolest licks are from horn players who will approach the chord tones from a half step below and things like that. But, in my simple mind, it all starts with the blues and basically adding more notes.

[Gitarrenvideokurse]

Hi, Jens,

first of all thank you for your videos and your inspiration. My mastery lies in the classical guitar and during the last 10 years fingerstyle and flatpicking on the steel string - jazz has always been a side issue for me, but due to my looper compositions and the freedom to improvise, I have been able to take the fretboard anew in recent years.

I get along very well with the structures of the CAGED system, which I also use very often - also as a methodology in my lessons:

1. I have the pentatonics inside

2. the Bluesscale

3. can derive major and minor scales and also modes from them

4. can first add individual option tones to the pentatonics, which 1. did not overwhelm me at the beginning and 2. also gives my students digestible morsels

5. I can play all arpeggios of different chords well, three voices, major, minor, augmented (is it the right english word? i'm not sure right now...) and diminished, add option tones (like melodic patterns, Jan-Hammer-Scale, etc.) or with options like 7, 9, 11, 13

6. the positions can be combined very well, especially in pentatonics, and we find this kind of view on the fretboard with a lot of "reference" guitarists from the blues and rock area. No matter if B.B.King, Albert King, Eric Clapton, Santana, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Mark Knopfler, Mike Oldfield, Andy Summers, Randy Rhodes, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert, all of them you will often find these structures in the solos - so if you want to play rock or pop, I think the CAGED system is the right choice for you.

7. I also use 3-notes-per-string, but rather for special applications. As you said before: this concept is especially good for the right hand because of its symmetry and is also very clear in other ways.Some fingerings are especially well suited and I use them for very fast sequence runs within a rock solo or I like to use sequences on 2 strings to move horizontally up or down the fretboard on b and e for example.

8. the 7-position concept is coherent, but due to the permanent stretching on a spanish guitar or a steel string it is no pleasure and for me it is too theoretical for the music I listen to or I play myself and seems to me not as practical as the above concepts.

So much for my modest and constantly growing insights into the fretboard :-) Thank you,

many greetings,

Peter