The CAGED System and 100 Licks for Blues Guitar: Learn To Play The Blues Your Way (Learn How to Play Blues Guitar)

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This book has opened up the neck for me after only a week! If you want to improve your ability to play anywhere on the neck, this book and tracks are for you!

CAGED system explained for major and minor shapes, but most of the book's focus is the blues' minor voicing. Minor pentatonic exercises over these shapes to warm you up, then pages of licks associated with each shape. I like the fact that the pages aren't crowded with tight packed tabs. Easy to read tabs and lots of room for my notes on every page. Downloadable audio for all examples in this book, but multiple examples are combined on a single track, so I had to split them up to make it easier to practice against. Lots of insight added in the book to help get the most from the blues.

Caged System book is very well written by Joseph. Foundational principles to understand the concept of the caged system and how it works.I purchased the book with a bit of regular usage if the caged system in my playing. This is a great reference manual to dig into and to keep going back for inspiration.With me already having caged system experience, you might wonder what I found most valuable, 'in the details' of the book. I found Jodeph's recommend licks for the Major, and Minor, as expected. But what really took me to the depth of his training was his examples with the Mixolydian cage licks, especially ehen he combined the Mixolydian with the Blues scale. That was a total eye/ear opener that is rarely taught, mixing the two together !!!! Opened my thought process up, which is the ideal hope in trying a new training process.Thank you. I highly recommend.

I might not be the target audience as I bought this book purely for the licks as I already have a good music theory background and find the CAGED system to be unnecessarily complicated. I purchased with the intention of learning some useful licks that would help with improvisation skills. Plenty are tricky and certainly will help people learn scale applications, but don't expect to have a bunch of cool new licks to add to your improv when you are done as most are more about techniques than sounding good.

The book describes the cage system for pentatonic scales very clearly and takes the reader through graduated steps to gain mastery over the system. As a teacher I highly recommend this.

As a beginner, I'm looking for very simple step by step "hand holding" if you will through the process of learning. This book is probably a little more oriented toward an Intermediate student. I didn't particularly like the CAGED explanations as they seemed a little too complicated and the explanations were a little hard to follow for the "big picture", but with separate images requiring a lot of page turning and referencing to the text which is a real pain in the Kindle app format. I see he now allows you to buy the PDF format directly, a huge improvement as you can now easily print out just the pages you want to take with you and study. What I DID like was the value for the money, there's an awful lot of information here. Also, this is one of the very FEW books that includes notation instead of TAB, and if you seriously want to be a musician you're going to need to be able to read music notation. The book is full of 'nuggets' and thorough information that will allow you to reference it as you grow. I know more in my head from studying than my hands can follow at this point so it's good to know the book won't be obsolete for me as I progress.

I',m finding myself using this more and more both as a lesson as well as ideas for warm-ups or those few minutes when I want to play something but want it to be meaningful. This book is good for both full practice and brief practice. I have the Kindle version which is great but may also get the paperback version.

I really want to learn and understand how to use the CAGED system. However when I got to page 8 I wrote "This is too complicated for me". I understand the principle and how useful it would be. However, I don't have the mental capacity to learn this. Maybe I need to settle as a "Campfire Guitarist". I don't blame this book, I have viewed many others and watched a number of Utube videos but I am still lost.

I'm a professional musician, with a degree and masters degree in music. I play jazz and classical piano and double bass, and have done professionally for 15+ years. I've taught beginners up to university level students and I now write music for a living. Learning blues guitar is something I've always wanted to do. I cannot fathom how many postive reviews this book has. The teaching method is sporadic and unmethodical. The information is not presented clearly or completely. Explainations of chord shapes / voicings / harmonies are incomplete. It's not pitched at the beginner, but nor is it useful to a trained musician. It is a truly awful book, and I shall be returning it.

It’s a fantastic book and well worth reading. I already had a very basic knowledge of the caged system - in as much as it uses moveable chords. But the exercises and explanations in this book have really helped me visualise the fretboard more clearly. Within a week of reading some of the book and doing a few of the exercises my playing began to change, and the board really has opened up.If you want to know more about CAGED and enjoy blues I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

This e-book is an instructional guide to playing the guitar. Its main aims are: to teach the player a systematic understanding of the guitar fingerboard; and then to guide the player into using that knowledge to play relatively sophisticated single-note lines all over the neck over standard blues changes.Joseph Alexander clearly knows his stuff. The layout of the material is logical and progressive. The CAGED system of basic chord shapes is used to provide a fixed scaffolding. Once the player can visualise the neck in terms of these simple chord shapes, Alexander demonstrates how this fixed framework can be used to integrate these chords with the minor pentatonic scale, so that the player can move easily between positions without getting lost.Having taught the basic positions in one key, the book then teaches the player how to play in multiple keys in a single position. The blues scale, mixolydian mode and major pentatonic are gradually introduced. In each case the scale is integrated with a set of reference chords and related to the scales the player has already learned, so that more and more note choices are made available without losing sight of the underlying framework that keeps the player orientated.This is a very usable manual for self-instruction. The insistence on visual mastery of the fingerboard – illustrated in clear fingerboard diagrams - pays off quickly, and Alexander's musical examples - downloadable from his site - place the emphasis on real music rather than sterile exercises. (The audio files are duplicated in the book in standard notation and tab.) I haven't seen this material laid out in such a clear and systematic manner anywhere else. Although Alexander assumes a basic familiarity with the instrument, he also covers such matters as how to select and hold a pick, and it's conceivable that with a little experienced guidance even a complete beginner could use this book to acquire the basis for a sound technique.It should be noted that the written musical examples – rather than the fingerboard diagrams - are much more clearly visible on a tablet-sized or larger device than on the smaller e-reader screens. I used the free Kindle for PC software and had no problems. This is the only small reservation I have about the book, which offers a great deal of useful material and a learning system that will be of permanent value for later work. At the current low price it is tremendous value for money.Highly recommended, particularly for the player who is encountering the limitations of a randomly-acquired technique.

I bought this book after doing some research as I had been looking for a book that explains the CAGED system after viewing some youtube videos on the subject. This book had good reviews so I decided to give it a try. The book explains the concepts and a very clear and succinct way and is easy to follow. The main concept in the book is to understand how the basic root position chord shapes connect and repeat across the fretboard and in so doing overlay the major/pentatonic scales. This really does unlock the guitar fretboard and tying licks/arpeggios to specific chord shapes then creates a palette of connected shapes and phrases for improvisation/soloing. Would recommend to others without hesitation.