aura lee caged

If you have a guitar method book like Mel Bay's or Alfred's sitting around and you feel like you've learned the notes in open position (or maybe not even those) and you'd like to expand your knowledge of notes over the entire neck try the following. Take a simple tune such as "Aura Lee" -- perhaps better known as Elvis's "Love Me Tender" -- and play it in as many of the 5 traditional major scale patterns (CAGED) as possible.

Here is what the first 4 bars of "Aura Lee" will look like as found throughout the CAGED system:

(E₀ means the E pattern in open position, E₁₂ is the E pattern at the 12th fret.)

So in this case the tune can be played in six different positions. And more generally speaking we can note that if the open G string on the guitar is the lowest note in a first position melody that same melody will be able to be played in all of these same patterns. If we only had notes on the E and B strings we would have even more possibilities; if an open D is in the mix less.

And since there's an interest in this blog about patterns in music, let's examine how the notes relate to each other across contiguous patterns. If we examine the penultimate measure we'll see a regularly occurring interlocking/overlapping-ness:

This is a beginning: we could also explore this tune as found throughout 3 note per string scales, too (or even 4-note/string if you're so inclined), which might be the subject of a blog down the line.