can someone help me make sense of guitar inversions
so I've been practicing caged system and I can play arpeggios the the chord tone position,
scale and pentatonic in all 5 positions. but something that I've still having trouble. sure I can rip thru it all, I just start at the first note of the position and it's just basically muscle memory from their BUT
I'm still at C. but when I change keys then I get messed up quickly. I forget what shape is C A G E D and get mixed up with which positions i can play up and down the positions using arpeggios.
and there is another thing that I still don't really have a good understanding at. it's inversions. like being able to play like any triad in the bottom 4 strings and being able to make any chords and their inversions.
I can play traidic in the bottom 4 strings horizontal and vertical but I get messed up when im trying to build the chords and inversions from the triads.
so I'm clearly not knowing everything that is there to know. and it doesn't help if only my fingers know it. can someone tell me the list of things that I should know by heart? i mean you ask that question, I should be able to instantly tell you
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It's just a game of maths as far as I'm concerned. For example, take the C major triad - C E G - and think about all the possible places where you can play those notes.
Looking at C.
E string - 8th/20th fret
A string - 3/15
D string - 10/22
G string - 5/17
B string - 1/13
You can figure out E and G yourself...
An inversion is just playing the same chord from a different starting note.
So C E G is the root, E G C is the first inversion, G C E is the second inversion.
There are of course other variations possible given it's much easier to span many octaves on a guitar compared to a piano.
A good practice for building inversions is to start with the root, so for example you can play C E G with: Low E 8th fret, A 7th fret, D 5th fret. Then as an exercise you can take away the low C and try to find the next C up to replace it - probably the 5th fret on the G string. Then you can either carry on doing this vertically up the strings or try doing the next inversion on the same strings but higher up the fretboard.
I'm not certain I understand what you're actually struggling with, but here goes.
You know 'the CAGED system' and use it to play chord shapes, arpeggios and pent. scales, but only in key C. For me, the CAGE(D) system works for chord shapes only. I must have learned everything else in other ways. Its use in chord shapes is that there are 5 basic shapes on guitar, based on the 'open chord' shapes - of c, A, G, E and D. They are movable - that's the whole point - and by knowing where the barre is on the neck, one can play say, C, in 5 different places. For example - C- open C shape; 3rd fret barre, A shape; 5th fret barre, G shape; 8th fret barre, E shape; 10th fret barre, D shape. That's maybe as far as you know so far. If not, forgive me!
You can move on from there, by moving up one fret with each. Now, you have 5 versions of C?. Move another fret up (two from original) and you have all the D chords.
That's the systematic way of doing it. A more practical way is to use these chord shapes in your actual playing of songs. Let's take a simple sequence - C - F - G - C. In open position, the C and G are there. You need an E shaped chord for F, on 1st fret. So now the sequence can be considered C-C shape O, F-E shape 1, G- Gshape 0. Translate all that up 2 frets to C shape 2, E shape 3, G shape 2, and the shapes are the same (except barred). The last nuber in each case is the barre fret. To play the same in key E, move u two more frets, and so on.
There are actually easier shape combinations that are more frequently used, but hopefully that's got you on your way. For C - F - G - C try fret 8 (E), fret 8 (A) fret 10 (A).
What may be confusing is matching chord shapes to arpeggios. Sometimes a note played in an arpeggio is missed from a chord shape, as it's unreachable.
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