You can learn how to play the open position E chord and CAGED E shape!
We’re building all CAGED chord shapes in this series of videos, we’ve done C A G and now we’re looking at the E chord.
This is one of the most common chords around. Easy to play, as in, the finger placement is really obvious, you should quickly move on to look at what intervals are in there in order to really get somewhere with this.
These are the intervals in an E chord: Root, 5th, root, 3rd, 5th, and root.
The next step is to turn it into a barre chord or as I prefer to say, an E shape. Looks like this in a Chordacus image.
E chord extensions
It’s a bit big, when we start extending it, we get rid of strings. Here are all possible extensions for an E chord shape.
- E major chord (root, 5th, root, 3rd, 5th, root)
- Eadd9 (root, 5, 9, 3)
- Esus4 (root, 5, root, 4, 5, root)
- E7sus4 (root, 5, b7, 4, 5, root)
- E6 (root, root, 3, 6)
- E13 (root, b7, 3, 6)
- E7#5 (root, b7, 3, #5)
- Emaj7 (root, 3, 5, 7)
- Emaj7 (root, 7, 3, 5)
- E7 (root, 5, b7, 3, b7, root)
- Emaj9 (root, 3, 5, 7, 9)
- E9 (b7, 9, 5, root)
You need song examples for all this to make sense.
Roxanne is probably the best song to look at for playing the sus4 and 7sus4 in an E shape.
In Whistle For The Choir, we play an open position E as we play the song in the original key. When we change the key to A to play with a female singer, we play it as an E-shaped A chord.
My favorite E-shaped 13 chord example is an instrumental song by Billy Cobham called Red Baron. It goes G13 – C9.
For 6 chords in an E shape, there are plenty of examples in the intermediate electric course. Son Of A Preacher Man is the best.
Building scales and arpeggios around the E chord/shape
We can turn the E shape into two arpeggios, a Major Pentatonic, Ionian (the major scale), Lydian, and Mixolydian.
Below are all intervals used to build these arpeggios and scales around the E-shaped chord.
If you can see all intervals around the chord shape, you can play all these arpeggios and scales.
If you looked at other CAGED chords, you’ve seen this exact diagram before. That’s because the intervals to build these arpeggios and modes are always the same, it’s the layout around the CAGED chord shapes that change.
| Maj7 Arpeggio | R | 3 | 5 | 7 | |||||
| Dom7 Arpeggio | R | 3 | 5 | b7 | |||||
| Major Pentatonic | R | 2 | 3 | 5 | 6 | ||||
| Major Scale | R | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | ||
| Mixolydian | R | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | b7 | ||
| Lydian | R | 2 | 3 | #4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
The E chord | Related pages
Guitar chords
Learn how to build minor and major guitar chords using the CAGED system.
This is the foundation upon which we learn to extend chords and build arpeggios and modes as well.
The Em chord
The easiest to understand of all minor chords, the Em chord is also the easiest to fret.
Once turned into a barre chord shape, we can see how the solution to understanding the fretboard when it comes to chords and scales simply lies within calling it an Em shape, not position 1.
