Can somebody explain to me what the reasoning or the “philosophy” behind it is? I know ( moreso accepted because I haven’t really applied it ) how it looks on the guitar with the shapes and such but It’s not connecting ( coming to me in a holistic way if that makes sense )
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It is a long since I saw the real explanation of it but the general idea is that shapes on guitar are movable. If you play a C major triad, move the same shape two frets up and you get a D major triad. “In the same fret range” you have different shapes for the same thing and these shapes are often referred as the C,A,G,E and D shape corresponding to the ground note in the lowest possible position of that shape.
A good example are bar chords. The most common bar chords are the E shape, where your fingers make the pattern of an E chords but with a bar instead of playing open strings, and the A shape. But you can do the same with a C,G or D chord. This way every chord can be played in multiple different shapes but at different positions, improving the number of possibilities.
The reason it are C,A,G,E and D has to do with the tuning of the guitar. In normal guitar tuning C,A,G,E and D major, minor, 7, … can all be played as open chords (played with also playing open strings) while other (F an B) can’t.
The standard guitar tuning is closely related to blues and the blues scale. The strings of the guitar are all of the natural notes in the E blues scale (they’re also the notes in the E minor pentatonic scale as well), and as a result of that tuning system the chords C, D, E, G, and A can be played with open strings.
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The letters are the different “open” chords on a guitar in standard tuning. Chords are made up from notes of a scale, so you can match the chord shapes to a scale shape.
Now the chord shape is really a set of relationships notes that we call intervals. So, if you move the whole shape higher up on the neck all the notes change and you can use your “C” shape to play a C# chord (one fret higher) or an G chord (6 frets higher) or whatever. Basically you remember the pattern and you can move it to whichever notes you need.
I hate that people call it a “system”. It’s not a system, it’s a basic observation.
C, A, G, E, and D are the five movable chord shapes, meaning they can be played as barre chords anywhere on the neck. If we want to play an F chord, we could play it as an E-shape chord on the 1st fret, a D-shape chord on the 3rd, a C-shape on the 5th, an A-shape on the 8th, a G-shape on the 10th, and then repeat again with E-shape on the 13th (and so on).
That’s it. It’s not a philosophy, it’s not a method, it’s not a “system”, it’s just an observation about chord shapes. It doesn’t help you play the instrument, and it doesn’t even really help you find ways to play a chord, since you still have to know your way around the fretboard.
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