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I studied the Caged system for scales on guitar and find it useful when I'm doing scales over chords, but when I'm doing Pentatonic scales, I only learned Major and Minor with roots on 5th and 6th strings. I'm interested in learning more but I've never heard about CAGED For Pentatonics.

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    To me, the CAGED system pretty much 'just works' for all types of scales - what difficulty are you having applying it to pentatonics?
    – Нет войне
    Mar 19, 2018 at 15:42
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    Yeah you just leave out two notes.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Mar 19, 2018 at 15:50
  • I suppose my difficulty has to do with my own uncertainty of if I do the analysis and figure out the fingering patterns, will I be able to pull it off, since in my little circle, no one has even mentioned it being done, let alone explained what I might need to understand. You've enlightened me and inspired me to move ahead with the idea.
    – skinny peacock
    Mar 19, 2018 at 21:41
  • I don’t understand, but I don’t play guitar so I’m just looking for someone to explain. To me, CAGED is pentatonic, namely (CDEGA) C major pentatonic or (ACDEG) A minor pentatonic. On a guitar you can move the shape up and down the neck, but it’s still pentatonic. What have a misunderstood?
    – Adam Chalcraft
    Oct 5, 2020 at 1:25

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(Expansion of comment)

The point of CAGED is to not see the C-A-G-E-D chord shapes as separate, but as one big interlocking chord shape that covers 12 frets - and then repeats again. This allows you to not get stuck in one little 'box' when playing chord tones up and down the neck. The idea is the same whichever chord type you're playing - Here's an illustration from rockprodigy.com of how it relates to the major and minor chords, for example...

major and minor caged

Once you are comfortable playing chord tones, it shouldn't take too much mental gymnastics to work out where each note in a whole scale is, based on where the chord tones are. As with the major and minor examples above, the CAGED 'concept' remains the same - you just have to teach yourself to 'spot' all the intervals in a scale - e.g. C major pentatonic:

C major pentatonic

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